The water infrastructure politics of eThekwini, the municipality that includes the city of Durban, have been splashed across the digital pages of South Africa’s news outlets in recent years.
They’ve covered the 2022 floods that damaged kilometres of pipes, water tanker purchases as a response to increasing water scarcity, and the disconnection of residential water storage tanks from municipal pipes to cope with leaky infrastructure. Like other South African municipalities, eThekwini has fallen behind on maintaining its piped water infrastructure and has looked to stopgap solutions.
The city’s water politics has a long history. Some of the infrastructure issues can be traced back to the mid-1800s, when it was a British imperial port.
