Twenty megalitres and a swept account
Johannesburg Water wants private producers to sell it up to 20 Ml/d each, and says it has “limited funds”. The harder question is who pays them, because every rand the utility collects is swept into the City’s account.
Johannesburg uses about 1.6 billion litres of water a day. On 6 October, Johannesburg Water asked the market for help. Its request for information invites private producers (borehole or surface water, with their own treatment and storage) to sell it potable water at up to 20 megalitres a day per facility. Prices are quoted in rand per kilolitre and metered to the utility’s standards. Responses were due by noon on 16 October. At full size, one facility would cover a little over 1% of the city’s daily use, so this is a stopgap, not a fix. The document is also candid about the catch: Johannesburg Water “has limited funds.”
Business Day (13 October) reported the RFI and its context. The utility says it is within its bulk allocation for now, but high non-revenue water and rising demand point to a shortfall. It adds that a private tariff above current bulk-supplier rates “would not make business sense.” The more important detail comes further down. Billing, credit control and collections still sit with the City’s group treasury, and all funds received are swept into the City’s primary bank account. Johannesburg Water has started a process to take control of its own finances under Treasury’s metro trading services reform. Private water in Joburg isn’t new: a Suez-led consortium ran the utility on a five-year management contract from 2001 to 2006. The DA has also put water partnerships in its manifesto for next month’s local elections.
So the specific bottleneck is not a shortage of willing producers. It is the buyer. Any producer signing a multi-year R/kL contract, and any lender behind that producer, will ask which account pays the invoice. Right now the honest answer is an account the utility doesn’t control. Getting a competitive price is the easy part. A creditworthy counterparty is the hard part.
That is the live debate under Johannesburg Water and Municipal Water Utility Reform, where the utility told Parliament in September 2025 of nearly 45% non-revenue water and a R27 billion infrastructure backlog. It also sits under National Treasury PPP Unit and Infrastructure Financing Reform, where the bottleneck is the capacity to prepare transactions, not a shortage of projects.
The textbook’s Chapter 3 names accelerating the PPP framework for infrastructure as a Tier 1 reform. The Infrastructure Fund has structured 26 blended-finance projects worth R130.8 billion, and the 2026 Budget announced its move into a new agency, IFISA, from April 2026 (Business Day); what is still short is a pipeline of bankable projects. Electricity shows what the prize looks like: REIPPPP procured over 6,000 MW through competitive bidding, and bid prices fell below Eskom’s average generation cost. Johannesburg’s RFI is exactly the kind of first step that starts a water pipeline. It also speaks to the strongest objection the chapter records, the IEJ’s fear of two-tier infrastructure. Here the private party sells bulk water to the public utility, which still serves everyone. In water, though, bankable starts with ring-fenced revenue. If the sequence is right (the utility controls its own cash first, then signs contracts), this is Tier 1 in action. If not, it’s another file that stalls at “limited funds.”