Johannesburg has lost more than R10 billion worth of drinking water in four years, with losses consistently above 45 percent. The Auditor-General blames a failure to maintain the network, and says it cannot even be sure how bad the losses really are.
This week the Auditor-General published its consolidated report on local government audit outcomes for 2024/25. For Johannesburg, the findings on water were damning. According to GroundUp’s analysis of the report, the city lost R10.3 billion worth of drinking water over four years. Its water losses have exceeded the 30 percent norm in every one of those years, and in recent years have consistently been above 45 percent.
In plain terms, of every R100 the city spends buying bulk water from Rand Water, around R45 is lost before anyone can be billed for it.
A failure to maintain
The Auditor-General was blunt about the cause. It cited Johannesburg Water’s failure to proactively maintain its water infrastructure. Maintenance, it found, is often deferred until assets fail, which leads to emergency repairs, frequent pipe bursts and declining reliability across the network. It blamed inadequate planning, poor execution of the maintenance plans that do exist and insufficient oversight by leadership.
The city’s maintenance spending tells the same story. Auditors told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts earlier this month that the city spends about 4 percent of its expenditure on maintenance, roughly half the level required. As far back as December 2024, the Auditor-General notified the city’s accounting officer of a material irregularity related to these failures.
How big are the losses really?
The auditors also raised a troubling question: whether anyone knows the true scale of the problem. Weak management systems at the city’s water and electricity entities make it difficult to quantify losses accurately, and the Auditor-General found weaknesses in Johannesburg Water’s performance reporting that make it hard to verify what it says it has achieved.
The figures that are available are stark. In its briefing to Parliament, the Auditor-General’s office put the city’s 2024/25 water losses at about R2.8 billion, of which about R2 billion related to leaks on the network and the rest to illegal connections, metering inaccuracies and billing errors. Other figures presented to Parliament put Johannesburg Water’s non-revenue water at 44.7 percent. Across all its entities, the city wrote off R9.5 billion of revenue as irrecoverable.
The wider audit picture
The water findings sit within a broader picture of financial strain. The city’s core administration received a qualified audit opinion for 2024/25, and the Auditor-General expressed concern that it had again tabled an unfunded budget for the new financial year. Electricity losses were even larger than water losses, at about R5.7 billion.
Appearing before Parliament, City Manager Floyd Brink accepted responsibility, as accounting officer, for the control failures behind the qualification, and said remedial measures had begun. Mayor Dada Morero linked many of the city’s problems to the structure of municipal entities created in the early 2000s, including Johannesburg Water, and said a remedial action plan was being drafted.
The R64 billion plan
Johannesburg Water did not respond to GroundUp’s request for comment, but it has previously said it is implementing a ten-year, R64 billion strategy covering leak detection, pressure management, pipeline upgrades, reservoir repairs and reducing illegal connections. The scale of that plan is a measure of the backlog, and it raises an obvious question: where will the money come from, given that the utility’s capital budget is a small fraction of what is needed, and that R4 billion owed to it by the city has still not been fully accounted for?
Accountability
WaterCAN’s Ferrial Adam put it simply: losing so much water with nobody held accountable cannot continue. She also criticised the tendency to focus enforcement on informal settlements, arguing that the city should concentrate on recovering revenue from large consumers and major debtors.
The Auditor-General’s findings strengthen the case for the reforms now before Parliament, including ring-fencing water revenue, licensing water service providers and holding officials personally accountable. They also add weight to the Human Rights Commission’s inquiry, which heard in May that the city spends around R130 million a year on tankers to supply communities its network cannot reach.
With local government elections approaching, Johannesburg’s residents now have an independent, authoritative account of how their water system has been managed. Over R10 billion lost in four years is not a technical footnote. It is money that could have repaired pipes, refurbished reservoirs and kept taps running. Whether anyone is held responsible for it will be one of the defining questions of the campaign.
References
GroundUp: Joburg watches R10-billion flow down the drain (24 June 2026): https://groundup.org.za/article/joburg-watches-r10-billion-flow-down-drain/
AllAfrica: Joburg watches R10-billion flow down the drain (25 June 2026): https://allafrica.com/stories/202606250028.html
EWN: City of Joburg recorded R9.5bn revenue loss across entities, says AG’s office (3 June 2026): https://ewn.co.za/2026/06/03/city-of-joburg-recorded-r95bn-revenue-loss-across-entities-says-ag-s-office
Business Report: City of Joburg admits audit failures as Parliament demands accountability (9 June 2026): https://businessreport.co.za/2026-06-09-city-of-joburg-admits-audit-failures-as-parliament-demands-accountability/
Daily Maverick: R4bn diverted from Joburg Water, Auditor-General says cash exists on paper (19 November 2025): https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-11-19-r4bn-diverted-from-joburg-water-auditorgeneral-says-cash-exists-on-paper/
TimesLIVE: Armed gangs, ageing pipes and tanker costs strain Joburg water system, commission hears (21 May 2026): https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2026-05-21-armed-gangs-ageing-pipes-and-tanker-costs-strain-joburg-water-system-commission-hears/