'We Can't Drink the Water, We Can't Breathe the Air': Joburg Residents Speak Out on a Crisis Years in the Making

Residents across at least four Johannesburg townships are this week running their own water-collection schemes, air-quality monitoring stations, and urban food gardens — filling a gap they say the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality has never adequately closed. The projects, several of which launched in the past 18 months, are small but growing, and the people behind them are blunt about why they had to start them.

The urgency is real. Johannesburg's Vaal Dam supply system, which feeds the metropolitan area alongside the Rand Water network, was sitting at 61.4 percent capacity as of the last weekly Vaal Complex report in late June — a figure that sounds reassuring until you consider that distribution infrastructure in older townships loses an estimated 37 percent of treated water to pipe leaks before it reaches taps, according to the Department of Water and Sanitation's 2025 municipal benchmarking audit. Add two years of intermittent load shedding that knocked out pump stations, and communities in Alexandra, Ivory Park, and southern Soweto have learned not to assume water will flow when they need it.

Voices from the Ground

In Alexandra, on the east bank of the Jukskei River along Selbourne Road, a collective calling itself AmaZwe Wethu — meaning "our lands" in Zulu — installed four 5,000-litre JoJo tanks last October, funded partly through a R180,000 grant from the Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Members collect rainwater from rooftops during the winter high-pressure breaks and distribute it free to about 340 households for garden irrigation, freeing municipal water for drinking. "The pipes here fail every second week," one female resident who helps run the collective told this reporter during a site visit on Wednesday. "We stopped waiting for Joburg Water to fix it."

Air quality is the grimmer conversation. The South African Air Quality Information System recorded PM2.5 readings above 75 micrograms per cubic metre on 19 separate days in Soweto's Nancefield station between April and June this year — nearly three times the World Health Organisation's 24-hour guideline of 25 micrograms. The readings spike on cold mornings when residents burn wood and coal in braziers and imbaulas, a practice directly tied to electricity costs. A prepaid unit of electricity in Johannesburg now costs approximately R3.28 per kilowatt-hour for the first 600 units under City Power's 2025/26 tariff schedule, up from R2.71 the previous year. For pensioners on R2,190 monthly social grants, that arithmetic makes coal the cheaper option, whatever the health cost.

The Soweto Climate Action Network, operating out of a community hall in Dube, has spent the past year distributing low-emission rocket stoves to families in Meadowlands and Orlando West. The stoves burn 40 percent less fuel than open braziers according to testing done by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. The network has handed out 620 units since January 2026, funded by a combination of private donors and a small allocation from the ANC-DA Gauteng provincial coalition's green economy budget line.

What Needs to Happen Next

Community organisers say the initiatives work but cannot substitute for municipal infrastructure. They are pushing Joburg Water to accelerate its R4.3 billion Bulk Water Master Plan, which includes pipe replacement in Alexandra and Orlando, and are demanding quarterly public reporting on progress. A coalition of civil society groups including the Centre for Environmental Rights and groundWork filed a formal complaint with the Gauteng Cooperative Governance MEC in May, arguing the city is in breach of the Water Services Act.

The next pressure point is September, when the City of Johannesburg tables its mid-year budget adjustment. Community leaders from AmaZwe Wethu and the Soweto Climate Action Network say they intend to present evidence to the council's environment portfolio committee — this time with air-quality data, not just grievances. Whether councillors engage seriously is a question several residents answered with weary scepticism. But they are showing up anyway.