Sewage-contaminated water flowed through taps in Tshwane for 21 days while authorities stayed silent, leaving more than 400 people sick. Experts say the chlorine shortage is a symptom of a broken system, not the cause and that the water crisis is escalating due to poor governance.
For three weeks, the water from the taps in Bronkhorstspruit and surrounding areas was contaminated with untreated sewage.
By the time authorities warned residents of Zithobeni, Bronkhorstspruit, Dark City, Rethabiseng and Sokhulumi in Tshwane, more than 400 people were sick from gastrointestinal disease. Most are under four years old. Nobody has died yet.
Two water and health experts have called this latest flashpoint another failure of governance leading to an “avoidable illness”. Both say they don’t buy the “lame-duck excuse” of blaming chlorine for this crisis.
The Department of Water and Sanitation has linked the Bronkhorstspruit water treatment works (BWTW), which was not chlorinated for three weeks, to people falling ill.
Tests by the National Institute of Communicable Diseases detected, among other pathogens, norovirus, campylobacter, and shigella in stool samples.
READ | At least 408 gastrointestinal illness cases linked to contaminated Tshwane water supply
Symptoms reported by sick residents include nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps and diarrhoea. Many say they were not warned in time.
More may get sick
“I call this a potentially avoidable illness. They are potentially avoidable if other parts of the water service did their jobs properly,” said Dr Jo Barnes, an epidemiologist and senior lecturer emeritus in the division of community health at Stellenbosch University.
Barnes says that the pathogens are associated with human sewage “and all of them, in one way or another, cause tummy upset, diarrhoea”.
These organisms live naturally in the gut of warm-blooded animals – particularly humans. In the gut, they are either part of digestion or its byproduct. The gut lining copes with them, but the problem begins when they leave the body.
“Once they escape out of the body, the organisms that belong in your gut can make me ill because my body doesn’t recognise that as part of my system,” Barnes says.
READ | Bronkhorstspruit residents drink brown water as hundreds treated for diarrhoea
They travel through wastewater – from flushing toilets, chamber pots, or anything that goes down a drain – into sewage systems. If those systems work, the organisms are killed, and the cleaned water is returned to nature. If they do not, the organisms survive and enter rivers, where they reach the next town’s drinking-water intake. This untreated water causes severe illness.
“It is not just an unfortunate experience that you have for a day or two,” Barnes says. For healthy adults, gastrointestinal illness is miserable but usually survivable. For young children, HIV-positive people, and anyone with a compromised immune system, the same organisms can be lethal.
“It can actually make them very ill or even cause death,” says Barnes, adding that the reason so many children fell ill is because of their underdeveloped immune system and smaller bodies.
Barnes warns that the number of sick people may increase as the water is still not safe to consume or use.
Dysfunction, not lack of chlorine
“In my professional opinion, that is a lame-duck excuse,” says water specialist Dr Anthony Turton, referring to the explanation that chlorine was not available for three weeks.
Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Mojadina said that, in addition to a lack of chlorination, an investigation revealed that the BWTW and the City of Tshwane’s sewage pump stations were dysfunctional.
Turton says that chlorine is not the “primary disinfectant”. “It is always basically a secondary disinfectant.”
He states it is used right at the end of the purification process “as a last line of defence”.
Tshwane Mayor Nasiphi Moya says the City takes “responsibility for the negligence”.
Turton says potable water standards are well known and that authorities are obliged to regularly monitor and report the state of the water to the department.
“They would immediately see long before there’s a crisis that there has been a disruption in some other parameter,” he says.
“The fact that the department didn’t receive the reports tells us that there was a breakdown in the reporting system, or the fact that they might have received the reports and the reports were non-compliant, but they did nothing about it.”
READ | ‘A bomb in our taps’: Moms, kids rush to clinics amid Bronkhorstspruit diarrhoea outbreak
“If the reporting is done on a regular basis, as it’s supposed to be, and then acted upon, then the crisis will be averted. So, I don’t buy that excuse.”
He also added that since Tshwane advises affected residents not to use the discoloured, brownish water for any purpose other than flushing toilets, “it’s an admission of failure to provide water security”.
In the short term, the health crisis must be dealt with “because that will kill you now”, he says. In the long term, water insecurity will lead to a lack of investment, resulting in unemployment, deterioration in housing and business valuations, and, ultimately, poorer residents.
Expect more contaminations
Barnes and Turton say the chain of contamination is not new, has occurred before, and is a structural failure due to inadequate maintenance of wastewater treatment plants.
Nearly half of South Africa’s 848 municipal wastewater treatment systems – 396 of them (47%) – are classified as being in a critical state of performance, according to the 2025 Green Drop Report. Only 14 are adequately functional.
Turton uses a plane analogy, saying that you want 100% compliance so the aeroplane doesn’t fall out of the sky. “If you’ve got only a 40% compliance, that means that six times out of 10 that aircraft takes off, it’s going to crash before it lands.”
In water terms, the Green Drop Report is the “most critical” compliance report and shows that it’s not just one wastewater works that’s dysfunctional. “It’s multiple wastewater works that are dysfunctional, and all of that stuff is just being discharged into the rivers.”
Barnes explains that in Bronkhorstspruit, the river is “hugely contaminated” and the failing wastewater treatment works higher up makes it worse.
READ | Noxolo Sibiya | Stop pretending the Bronkhorstspruit crisis started yesterday
A failure at these plants – as this incident shows – pollutes the river downstream and makes it more difficult to remove contaminants the next time, making it harder to produce proper drinking water, she says.
Barnes says there seems to be no sustained or concerted effort to change the broken system that has persisted for years and affects residents who rely on tap water nationwide daily.
“There are deaths that happen every day across the country. But because it happens in ones and twos, it doesn’t register to this scale. It’s the sheer number of more than 400 sick people that is now drawing attention.”
She hopes this kickstarts the political will to avoid a further catastrophe and a public health emergency where preventable deaths happen.
