South Africa’s water infrastructure is being pushed to the edge, a crisis that could be worse than load shedding as early wanring signs already here.
Speaking in an interview with Jeremy Maggs, Riskonet Africa risk expert Volker von Widdern warned that the system is now close to breaking under extreme and simultaneous pressure.
He warned that South Africa is entering a dangerous phase where chronic underinvestment, collapsing wastewater plants, leaks, and failing oversight could trigger cascading failures across cities and industries.
For households and businesses, the real danger lies in how abruptly these failures can materialise.
“There’s no visibility of what is going to happen to your water supply until the catastrophic event happens, such as no water in the pipe, or you’re notified of a major repair and you’ll be cut off,” he said.
Von Widdern argued that the problem is rooted in a poor understanding of the entire water value chain.
“We talk about the resource, the treatment, the distribution, and consumption. If you look at all those four segments carefully, one can do a lot better compared to the outcomes that we are facing right now.”
Instead, failures are compounding across every stage of the system.
He highlighted that climate change has intensified these pressures but cannot be blamed as a sudden or unforeseen factor.
“Climate change is not sudden. It’s been on our doorstep for the last 10 or 20 years,” von Widdern said.
He added that dam silting, driven by poor land use, overgrazing, and weak environmental management, has further reduced the system’s ability to cope with heavy rainfall.
“If we’re not looking after our land resources, we will add to the flooding problem, and the dams won’t manage severe water spikes as they were planned to.”
The decay of infrastructure, however, is largely man-made. Von Widdern said decades of inconsistent and short-term investment decisions have hollowed out critical assets.
“One of the key issues is inconsistent and non-strategic medium- to long-term investment,” he explained.
“If government departments or local authorities swing expenditure toward salaries and services and away from infrastructure maintenance and development, you will run out of infrastructure.”
The biggest public service issue reported
He stressed that South Africa’s vulnerability to extreme weather events is already evident, pointing to flooding in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, and parts of the Kruger National Park.
“We’ve seen water levels rise 10 to 20 metres, and then you have an extreme problem,” von Widdern noted.
Aging floodlines, blocked stormwater systems, and unplanned development have only increased the damage.
For businesses, von Widdern said the most urgent step is to rethink assumptions about water security.
He argued that on-site storage, rain harvesting, and shared bulk water systems in business parks will become essential.
“Water storage on site and in commercial operations is going to be a new strategic requirement.”
He warned that without it, production-heavy industries face severe disruption as the national system continues to strain.
Water outages have replaced load-shedding as the biggest public service issue reported on the popular South African app EskomSePush (ESP).
With load-shedding on the decline, ESP has adapted its platform to allow users to report and share updates about various service interruptions.
The ESP Chats feature acts as a type of interactive community notice board for neighbourhoods to communicate about all types of events in their area.
These include localised power cuts, water outages, Internet service disruptions, notifications about lost and found pets, and crime incidents.
In recent feedback to MyBroadband, ESP co-founder Herman Maritz highlighted water outages as a major source of traffic, driving activity on the app to similar levels as on load-shedding days.
“People are desperate for real-time info on water trucks, reservoirs, and restoration times,” he said. “In some metros, big water outages now generate as much traffic as an ordinary national load-shedding day.”
