Taps could run dry by the end of the month in the city of Gqeberha, where drought and crumbling infrastructure are already leading to water shortages.
“You do have to concede that political challenges or instability in administrations has had an unavoidable knock-on effect on decision-making” related to water, Bangazi said.
Like many crises in South Africa, Gqeberha’s water shortage is also a study in inequality. Although rolling water outages have affected the entire area, residents of the city’s walled suburbs can offset the impact by drilling boreholes or simply buying bottled water. But much of Nelson Mandela Bay’s population lives in townships, the under-resourced, apartheid-era communities originally built around South African cities to house Black workers.
In Kwa Nobuhle, a township in the nearby town of Kariega, Ntombentle Nelana says much of her life now revolves around finding water and preserving her supply. At her house, she says water comes out of the taps only a couple hours a day, usually in the middle of the night. “If you’re asleep and you don’t hear it, you can easily miss it,” she said. The city sends out water tankers, “but you don’t know when they are coming.
Nelana can no longer afford to water her garden, which she once relied on for spinach, peppers, and watermelons. “When you wash your body, you then keep that water for washing your clothes, and after you wash your clothes, you keep it for the toilet,” she says. But sometimes it isn’t enough, and Nelana, whose only work is a part-time job as a gardener for the municipality, has to buy bottled water from local shops. “It’s expensive for me,” she said.
But city officials have urged all residents to limit their daily consumption to 50 liters — roughly four toilet flushes. Doing so, they say, will help delay “day zero” by a month or more, giving local government enough time to build infrastructure to reroute water from a still-functional dam that supplies a different part of the municipality. Similar water-saving measures helped Cape Town
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