Jon

Johannesburg's city government emptied its own water company's bank account the night before a new rule would have locked that money in for water. About $200 million, down to zero. Four months later, people in the city that's home to Africa's biggest stock exchange are lining up at trucks for 13 gallons of water a day. Johannesburg buys its water from a big regional supplier called Rand Water, and nearly half of what it buys disappears before anybody gets a bill for it. About a quarter of all of it just leaks out of busted pipes into the dirt. Over the past year the city logged more than 50,000 leaks. That works out to about 140 a day, every single day. Fixing the whole network would cost something like $1.6 billion. At the pace they're going now, one South African think tank figures it would take about 200 years to replace all the old pipes. The city pulls in roughly $700 million a year selling water, and less than $80 million of that goes back into building and fixing the system. One watchdog group says the city has swept more than $350 million out of the water company this term alone. After the June raid, the water company couldn't pay about $100 million in bills and shut down most of its projects, leak repairs included. So even more water leaked. Now follow the money on the other side. Every time a pipe stays broken, somebody gets paid to drive water into that neighborhood on a truck. Johannesburg has spent almost $40 million on water trucks in five years, and it still won't tell anyone who got the money. A court threw out one $16 million truck contract last December over irregularities. An investigator with South Africa's Human Rights Commission said they found evidence that water infrastructure was sometimes sabotaged on purpose to drum up truck business, and the country's own water minister has called the people behind it a mafia. What gets me is that the family waiting at the truck for their 13 gallons still counts as having water service in the official numbers, because their house has a tap.

😂 LOL “Potholes will be there because we live in the situation of climate change” FFS 🤣🤣