In a concerted effort to address the persistent water shortages plaguing Johannesburg, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the residents of Westbury and Coronationville upped their ante by staging two different protests, one outside the office of Mayor Dada Morero and another in Westbury on Wednesday morning.
This action follows an earlier demonstration outside the city’s council offices on Wednesday, where party members and concerned residents gathered to voice their frustrations over the dire water situation in the city.
In a stark warning last month, Morero indicated that the city could soon be facing a “Day Zero” scenario if the water crisis continued unchecked.
This alarming prediction, however, has been met with pushback from the Minister of Water and Sanitation, Pemmy Majodina, who refuted claims of an impending crisis.
As protesters clad in blue rallied outside Morero’s office chanting: “Where is our water?”, the DA’s regional chairperson, Wendy Alexander, addressed the crowd with an impassioned plea for action.
“This water crisis in Johannesburg is not a natural disaster; it is a man-made catastrophe stemming from years of this council's reliance on cadre deployment rather than appointing qualified individuals to ensure clean, reliable water flows into our taps... They forget that water is not a luxury but a basic human right,” Alexander said.
The demonstration in Braamfontein coincided with protests by Westbury residents, who barricaded roads to voice their dissatisfaction with ongoing water shortages in their area.
Reports indicate that police arrested one individual during the Westbury protest, while Johannesburg City Manager Floyd Brink assured the community that their water issues would be addressed by week’s end.
Brink also mentioned that new water projects were in the pipeline to resolve these challenges and highlighted that water tanks and trucks were being deployed as a temporary measure.
During their protest, the DA submitted two memoranda of demands to the City of Johannesburg. DA caucus leader, Belinda Kayser-Echeozonjoku, stated that these documents represented the outrage of hundreds of thousands of residents fed up with the unreliable water supply.
The first memorandum called for the dissolution of the cadre-appointed board of Johannesburg Water, while the second urged the Speaker of the Johannesburg Council, Nobuhle Mthembu, to ensure proper implementation of these demands.
Charged with the belief that the coalition governing the city, comprised of the ANC, ActionSA, EFF, and PA, is failing its residents, Kayser-Echeozonjoku condemned their “practices of cadre deployment and misgovernance,” asserting that such failures cannot be allowed to continue.
“Residents have the right to services and the right to transparency when services are at risk. Hundreds of thousands of people face daily water outages in Johannesburg,” she said.
“There can be no trusting relationship between the people of Johannesburg and the current governing coalition when nothing is being done to address the crisis, especially after the recent need for national ministerial intervention.”
The Star