By Gontse Sekhantso
More than half of eThekwini’s water is being lost before it reaches residents, while the Democratic Alliance alleges that “water mafias” are deliberately disrupting supplies to create demand for water tankers.
The allegations come after Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina rejected a further deferment that would have allowed eThekwini to continue over-abstracting water from regional resources after repeated concessions since 2023.
WaterCAN has supported the department’s action in principle, but said that residents in informal settlements and poor and rural communities were likely to bear the brunt of further restrictions.
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“The city’s inability to get its house in order is extremely dangerous for regional water security and could have a massive impact on our country’s objectives of equitable access to water for all,” WaterCAN executive director Dr Ferrial Adam said in a statement on Tuesday.
As reported by Inside Politics, In a 9 September letter to eThekwini Mayor Cyril Xaba, Majodina said the municipality had failed to meet commitments made in August 2025 to reduce water demand by 1% a month for eight months.
She said that allowing the city’s conduct to continue would increase the risk of “severe restrictions and potential system failure to supply water”, with “serious consequences for water users and the regional economy”.
Majodina said there was no “reasonable basis to conclude that a further deferment would produce a different outcome”.
eThekwini’s non-revenue water stood at 55.6%, while unresolved water faults increased from 744 in November 2025 to 14,776 by May 2026, according to Majodina.
The letter also identified shortages of plumbers, vehicles and other critical resources, as well as delays in appointing external plumbing contractors, as constraints on leak repairs and other interventions aimed at reducing water losses.
Meanwhile, the DA has presented a five-year scorecard of the ANC-led governance in eThekwini, saying that the deterioration of the city’s water infrastructure confirms warnings it made about the municipality.
“KwaZulu-Natal municipalities don’t have a water crisis. There’s a lack of political will to ensure that water comes out of people’s taps,” DA KZN leader Sithembiso Ngema said.
Ngema said that “water tanker mafias” benefiting from water tanker services deliberately interfere with water infrastructure to create conditions in which municipalities have to deploy tankers.
He said that some were closing taps or water valves so that residents were left without a regular supply.
“It’s a well-orchestrated plan to ensure that there’s no water so that the municipality will start to use water tankers and those water tanker mafias are benefiting from the municipality,” he said.
“[The city] can stop the water mafia but they fail to do so. The water tankering mafias are the guys who are actually benefiting from the water crisis,” he said.
The dispute over “water tanker mafia” has spilled into the DA’s election campaign.
On 28 September, the party unveiled a billboard along the N2 carrying the message: “You can stop the water tanker mafia. Vote DA for water in your taps.” It featured Xaba, City Manager Musa Mbhele and Executive Director for Technical Services Ednick Msweli.
The DA said the three appeared on the billboard because it held them accountable for failing to repair the water system and for the city’s dependence on tankers.
Lawyers acting for the city officials subsequently demanded that the DA remove the billboard and apologise, saying that its wording was defamatory and could imply that the officials were involved in organised criminal activity.
The DA refused to remove it, but the billboard was later taken down by the advertising company to protect its business and its landlord’s interests and to remain neutral.
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After its removal, DA eThekwini mayoral candidate Haniff Hoosen accused the city of focusing on the billboard instead of the water crisis.
“Officials in the government of eThekwini are so scared of accountability, that they don’t want you to see a billboard that exposes the city’s water tanker mafia,” Hoosen said.
“The DA’s position was clear, we were not willing to remove the billboard, yet despite this, the billboard has been taken down.
“The city has chosen to fight a billboard, threatening legal action to defend incompetence, rather than spending the money on fixing the pipes.”
The municipality welcomed the billboard’s removal, with Mbhele saying that public officials should be able to perform their duties without having their integrity undermined and that political contestation should not become defamation.
On 29 September, eThekwini announced that it had stopped outsourcing its water tanker service after investing about R345 million to bring the operation in-house. The city said it had an operational fleet of 318 tankers and planned to procure another 43 before the end of the year.
Xaba said at the time that bringing the service in-house had helped the city curb wrongdoing associated with outsourcing following allegations that water infrastructure had been tampered with.
WaterCAN has questioned the scale of the city’s continued dependence on tankers while it struggles to repair water infrastructure.
“It is deeply troubling that a city that is unable to fund repairs and maintenance of its water infrastructure still operates 318 water tankers and that 39% of the 111 wards in the city are almost entirely reliant on water tanker services to meet their water needs,” Adam said.
“Clearly there is money to purchase and operate tankering services. This irresponsible use of funds needs to be investigated and instead the money should be redirected to paying contractors to fix, repair and upgrade the city’s infrastructure instead.”
The municipality reported in February that 39% of its 111 wards remained reliant on full-time tanker supply.
WaterCAN has demanded that eThekwini disclose all current and historical costs associated with municipal and privately operated water tanker services and wants the city’s water and sanitation unit investigated by the Department of Water and Sanitation or other oversight bodies.
It has also called for punitive action against the city’s responsible leadership and for individuals to be held accountable.
Hoosen said the continued deterioration of the city’s water system pointed to failures in political and administrative leadership.
“The amount of money that we have been spending on the tankering services is an indication that somebody is benefiting out of this crisis,” Hoosen said.
He accused the city leadership of failing to address the problem over the past five years.
“The city leadership have failed themselves to do it, and we are not going to keep quiet about it. We are going to expose those people who are getting paid to do a job and they have failed to do their job for the last five years and the people have a right to know,” Hoosen said.
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The DA has also called for Msweli to be suspended pending an investigation, saying that the deterioration of the water system warrants greater scrutiny of the municipality’s leadership.
The party said it had warned that governance and service delivery in eThekwini would continue to deteriorate.
“After five years, the people of this city have a right to ask a simple question, Is eThekwini performing better today than it was five years ago?” the DA said.
According to the DA, eThekwini was losing about 48.9% of its water when the current council term began in 2021, with the figure reaching about 65% by 2026.
The party said this amounted to approximately 21 billion litres of water being lost every month and has separately said the municipality had more than 13,000 active water leaks.
The DA has also put the financial cost of water losses at approximately R2.9 billion in the 2024/25 financial year.
