Johannesburg Water faces, daily, as many headaches as a typical household

WE CAN all agree that running the day-to-day aspects of a household is generally challenging, even when bigger responsibilities are removed from the equation, such as assets management (cars and house), long term planning (children’s future), investment (future expenses), among others. What remains are everyday decisions, time and human resource allocations, expenses, and the maintenance thereof, and these tend to compound over time.

The City of Joburg services 1.96 million households on a day-to day basis with various services. Johannesburg Water delivers water and sanitation services to most of these households. A lot goes on behind the scenes at the water utility, in terms of what eventually affects the customer. With that said, I hope it can be appreciated that Johannesburg Water as a utility faces as many headaches as a typical household does on an everyday basis, in holistic simplification.

When one alludes to operations in a Johannesburg Water context, what is being referred to, is water reaching your household/place of residence/ industrial location, wastewater leaving these areas and being channelled to treatment facilities, and everything else in between. Imagine everything that goes on in a typical working household from the time everyone returns home at the end of the work day until the last person leaves the

next morning.

A lot of things need to be put in place, executed, and harmonised just to get through dusk to dawn, and this is with the knowledge and confidence that on most days everything will be in its place in the morning.

Now picture a scenario where there is an element of confidence that many things will not remain where they were placed come the next day, and this is the reality. This situation is standard to a point where it must be planned for, but how much replenishment can be planned for to opportunity cost. Opportunity cost being the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. The implication being that without replacement of what is no longer there has ramifications which will affect the customer in another way, meaning that either way there is going to be a problem.

The entity faces multiple challenges, one of which is infrastructure backlog; this brings complexities which on its own is major. Now add just one of many challenge dimensions experienced in the operations space of the utility.

On any given day cycle, your household is missing a kettle, toothbrushes, TV remote controls, and a couple of light bulbs. These items are not going to rattle your lives, but they will definitely disrupt the flow process of your household and will still require replacement. Every now and then your house will be ransacked which will then cause major disturbances in your lives, needing major interventions.

The bottom line is the things mentioned above have resource implications, and this is but one dimension of many that are faced by the Operations Department on an unhealthy frequency.

The Johannesburg Water leadership must contend with this reality, and important decisions still needs to be made, where the customer is unaware of the factors that affect the decisions that are made, which may seem non-methodical to the customer.

I hope this piece will add insight to the puzzle.