The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) on Tuesday claimed the Democratic Alliance (DA) is using the ongoing water crisis in the City of Johannesburg to secure political favours and barter for positions, notably the Mayorship of the City, and blamed the City for the man-made water crisis.

The DA has been vocal about the City’s failing water system.

From leaks that run for years without repair, to plunging Rand Water reservoir levels, and most recently, the R4-billion that City of Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero quietly shifted away from Johannesburg Water while residents are left queuing at tankers.

Earlier this month, the party called for a full overhaul of the City’s entities and requested that National Treasury investigate Joburg’s water tanker contracts.

The party had since called on Morero to dissolve what it said was the “cadre-filled board” of Joburg Water and to also appoint fit-for-purpose engineers and experienced individuals to run the entity.

MKP national spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela said the party condemned what it termed “incompetence and dereliction” of duty by the City of Johannesburg and the DA-led so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), whose “collective failure has plunged residents into an avoidable and manufactured water crisis”.

Following an oversight visit to the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, the MKP confirmed that the system is operating at full capacity.

“…contrary to the excuses peddled by municipal officials, water is indeed flowing at a rate of 20 000 litres per second via the Vaal River system into Gauteng. The infrastructure's maintenance is complete, and the supply is stable,” explained Ndhlela.

He stated that the party's members who served on the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Water and Sanitation had seen the evidence firsthand.

“What they found confirms what communities already know: Johannesburg is not a victim of water scarcity but of political negligence. There is no water shortage. There is, however, a shameful collapse in water distribution caused entirely by the incompetence and mismanagement of the Johannesburg metropolitan municipality. This is purely political failure.

“This crisis is not isolated. It is symptomatic of a broader national decay under the so-called GNU, a cobbled-together coalition of self-serving elites who lack both the political will and capacity to govern,” he said.

He claimed that the GNU had proven to be a government in name only - “absent, unaccountable and fundamentally illegitimate in the eyes of the people”.

Ndhlela claimed that following the Gauteng Government of Provincial Unity's collapse, African National Congress and State President Cyril Ramaphosa was working to regain political ground by engaging factions within the Government of Local Unity, using the City of Johannesburg as a bargaining chip.

“Securing control of the City, backed by the DA and Helen Zille as their mayoral candidate, would serve as a model for expanding the DA's influence across other municipalities in South Africa. The MKP sees through this desperate attempt to broker political arrangements that do not serve the interests of our people,” he said.

The MKP demanded immediate accountability from those responsible for the “engineered crisis and gross failure to provide a basic and constitutionally enshrined human right”.

“Our people are not asking for favours, they are demanding what is rightfully owed to them. As the 2026 local government elections draw near, South Africans must take note of these failures and must refuse to tolerate a political order that cannot even deliver water, while the taps of corruption remain wide open,” said Ndhlela.