JOHANNESBURG - Johannesburg residents are now being encouraged to be mindful of their water usage.
Some suburbs are facing complete water outages, while others are dealing with water disruptions, placing an additional burden on residents.
According to water expert Anthony Turton, this predicament is a result of a leadership crisis, characterised by an unstable coalition government within the local municipality.
The inability to reach a consensus and allocate portfolios is indicative of a complete failure of the Johannesburg Municipality, with no external factors to blame.
Turton said, "at the heart of it all it comes down to the failure of our institution a failure of your decision making structures that do long term forecasting and long term planning and at the very heart of it , it goes back to 1994 when we became a democracy when a decision was made separately… and basically the responsibility of long term planning was taken away from the Department of Water Affairs at that point in time an displaced in a municipal department where that had never ever had any experience of doing this before so it the inability to do long term forecasting but ultimately at the end of the day it comes down to a leadership crisis where you have an unstable coalition government in a local municipality unable to reach agreement, unable to allocate portfolio, unable to take responsibility."
"How can you expect the department that those people are supposed to control; how can you expect them to do adequate forecasting? So this is an absolute failure of Johannesburg Municipality and nobody else.”