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Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina handed over the World Heritage Irrigation Structure (WHIS) Award to the Orange-Vaal Water Users Association in the Northern Cape on September 18, 2025.
Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina has blamed persistent water shortages that have seen communities go days without water on the municipalities’ inability to take proper care of water infrastructure and lack of skills.
Her remarks follows a national water crisis in the country.
On Tuesday, Midrand residents protested after six days of outages caused by a pump’s motor explosion at the Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant.
Majodina says only 40 out of 257 municipalities have acted on recommendations to fix leaks, disconnect illegal connections and improve billing systems.
She says 56% of treated water is lost before reaching residents due to leaks, poor maintenance, and technical skill shortages in municipalities.
Majodina says, “We have pointed out all those things to municipalities to say, whilst we have filled all your vacancies, but critical and technical skills are not there in these municipalities, hence, people go days, months, years without water, because there is nobody that is attending to water infrastructure they are based on. Every day, water is running down the street, every day w e are losing about 56% of clean treated water.”
VIDEO | Majodina responds to the water crisis in SA:
