Same rules, 8% and 44%
In 2025 more than a third of South African households went two days or more without water. Among the metros, Cape Town was at 8% and eThekwini at 44%. The gap comes from maintenance, not rainfall.
In 2025, about 38% of South African households had a water outage lasting two days or more, even though 76% now have a tap inside the house or on the property. Those numbers come from Stats SA's General Household Survey, charted by The Outlier for GroundUp (2 October). The eight metros did a bit better at 30%, but the spread between them is the real story. Cape Town was at 8%, then Ekurhuleni 22%, Mangaung 24%, Tshwane 31%, Buffalo City 33%, Nelson Mandela Bay 38%, Johannesburg 40% and eThekwini 44%.
The main cause isn't drought. It's old, poorly maintained pipes that leak and burst. The Auditor-General finds that eThekwini loses 61% of its water to leaks, illegal connections or unbilled use, while Cape Town loses about a quarter. Nationally, the No Drop report shows non-revenue water rising from 37% in 2014 to 47% in 2023, against an international average of about 30%. Treasury puts the metros' lost water at nearly R8.7bn in 2023/24. In effect, that is a maintenance budget being paid out through burst mains.
This is the live debate under Municipal Water Loss Reduction (Non-Revenue Water). Ring-fenced grants for leak repair and meters already exist, but most municipalities lack the technical staff to keep pressure-management programmes running. The evidence on that page includes GTAC's work on performance-based contracts for cutting water losses and CDE's brief on Treasury's Metro Trading Services Reform, which ties conditional funding to how well a utility performs.
Chapter 3 of the textbook calls water "the next emergency", and its reform tiers give two answers. The Tier 2 answer is a ring-fenced maintenance levy, because maintenance gets cut first when its costs land later. But metros working under the same Constitution and fiscal framework range from 8% to 44%, which says the achievable path doesn't have to wait for that. Operation Vulindlela's Phase II push into local-government support and water licensing, next to Treasury's metro trading-services reform, is the Tier 1 move this chart argues for. With the 4 November local elections a month away, "how many days were your taps dry last year?" is a fair question for every metro candidate.