Ask anybody who has gone a few days without water what the first problem was, and it is unlikely to be drinking or washing. It is the toilet. One flush, and the cistern doesn’t refill; within an hour, a bathroom has stopped working in a house with nowhere else to go.

By the third day, a household has worked out several more things it had no reason to know. That water is much heavier than it looks once you are carrying it any distance. And that “the municipality is attending to it” is a sentence which can be repeated for a week while nothing happens.

None of this is dramatic, which is why so little is written about it. It is the slow discovery of how much of an ordinary life rested on the assumption that a tap would work, and how little of that anybody can replace on their own.

Over a decade and a half, we have learnt how to live without electricity. It is worth being precise about how, because it explains why water will be harder.

Those who could afford it left the grid. Solar panels, an inverter, a battery. More than a million households did it, and what they installed adds up to a massive power station on the country’s rooftops. Those households did not reduce their dependence on Eskom. They ended it.

The rest coped. A candle, a gas burner, a neighbour with a generator. It was miserable and unequal, but survivable, because electricity has substitutes. Coal, gas, nuclear, wind, sunlight, one standing in for another.

Water has no substitute. You can move it, store it, clean it, pump it out of the ground at great expense, but you cannot replace it.

Some people who can afford anything may have a water tank, and it is not a substitute. It is a delay. It holds what you put in it, and then it is empty, and you are where your neighbour without one has been since the first morning.

Then there is the part that has no private version whatsoever.

You can generate your own electricity. You cannot run your own sewer. That requires pipes, pumps and treatment works, all of them working. Nearly half of the wastewater treatment works assessed across this country are rated critical.

So, the household with the tank buys itself a few days. The household without one waits for a water tanker.

And a water tanker is not a service. It is an event. It arrives somewhere in the area, at a time nobody can tell you in advance, and stays until it is empty. You hear from a neighbour or a WhatsApp group message and come back with as much as your arms will hold.

Which is manageable if you are forty and fit and somebody is home during the day.

It is not manageable if you are eighty, or ill, or using a walker, or looking after small children on your own, or working a shift that ends after the water tanker has gone. The people who need water most reliably are the people least able to queue for it and carry it home.

Now the part that should trouble everybody.

At the end of August, the country’s dams were more than 95 percent full. The national average, across more than two hundred of them.

And more than 45 percent of the treated water in this country never reaches anybody. It leaks out of the ground, or runs through connections nobody has recorded, or passes through meters that do not work, or is delivered and never billed. Roughly two-thirds of it is physical. Pipes. The rest is a management problem wearing an engineering costume.

This is not a shortage. The rain fell, the dams filled, the treatment works produced, and then we lost half of it somewhere between the plant and the person.

The department that measures this puts the value at around R26 billion a year. It estimates R90 billion a year is needed to fix and maintain the network. Roughly R17 billion is spent.

Any turnaround, in any business, starts in the same place. Before you raise your prices, you stop the losses. Nobody would accept a factory that lost half its output between the line and the loading bay.

Yet that is roughly what happens. Tariffs rise on the households that still pay.

Which is where the ratepayer sits, paying three times over. Once for the water that reaches the house. Once, inside the tariff, for the water that reached nobody. And once more, for what the failure costs afterwards, which is the payment nobody invoices. A morning off work waiting for a water tanker. A day’s wage. A child kept home from school. A clinic visit when what finally arrived was not clean. That third bill falls hardest on the households least able to absorb it.

Water is not run from Pretoria. Municipalities run it, and in a few weeks this country elects the councils that run them. Whatever else is on that ballot, the pipe under the road is on it as well.

So, there is a question worth putting to whoever comes knocking before 4 November. How much of this municipality’s water is lost before it reaches a customer, and what is being done about it? A councillor who cannot answer has answered.

Somewhere tomorrow morning a tap will be opened, and nothing will come out of it.

They will not be short of water. It fell as rain, it sits behind a wall a few hours away, it was cleaned and pumped and sent in their direction, and then it went into the ground under a road nobody has got to yet.

That is not a drought. A drought is weather, and nobody votes for weather. This was a series of decisions, each one small enough to defend at the time, and in a few weeks the people who took them will be asking for your vote.

 

Yusuf Bodiat is a chartered accountant, certified director and former chief financial officer. He is the founder of Pragmatic Thinking, an independent strategic advisory firm, and serves as a non-executive director on several boards. He is the author of The Bottom Line: A CFO’s Blueprint for South Africa’s Turnaround, published in February 2026.