Lesufi hits back at DA over Tshwane water tankers, says party appointed current contractors
JOHANNESBURG — Gauteng ANC chair Panyaza Lesufi on Friday pushed back at the Democratic Alliance’s billboard campaign over Tshwane’s “water mafia,” saying th...
JOHANNESBURG — Gauteng ANC chair Panyaza Lesufi on Friday pushed back at the Democratic Alliance’s billboard campaign over Tshwane’s “water mafia,” saying the party is attacking a problem it helped create. He said the current water tanker contractors in Tshwane were appointed under DA rule.
Lesufi points to Tshwane contracts
Lesufi accused the DA of being “opportunistic” and said its criticism rings hollow because the party ran Tshwane when the contracts now under scrutiny were awarded. “The water tankers of Tshwane, the current contract for water tankers — who appointed them? It’s the DA,” he said.
He argued that the municipality has since shifted away from private ownership of tankers. According to Lesufi, Tshwane now uses water tankers owned by the municipality. He said the same approach is being extended in Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg.
The ANC chair also dismissed the billboard as political theatre. The DA, he said, has “run out of ideas” and now speaks as if it is detached from its own record in local government.
Water tankers at the centre of a wider political fight
The row lands in the middle of a broader battle over water tanker spending in Tshwane, where opposition parties have traded accusations about corruption, waste and weak service delivery. In March, reports highlighted a political clash over R777 million spent on tanker operations in the 2024/25 financial year, with concerns about irregular procurement and connected beneficiaries.
The DA has insisted that the city’s growing reliance on tankers points to deeper failures in water infrastructure and losses in the metro. Earlier this year, DA Tshwane chief whip Jacqui Uys said spending had jumped sharply from less than R200 million a year in the final year of DA-led coalition government to R777 million under the current administration, citing the Auditor-General’s report as suggesting the figure may have reached a billion rand.
That accusation has been met with a counterattack from the ANC-linked coalition side. ActionSA national chair Michael Beaumont said the contracts under scrutiny were awarded during the DA’s own tenure, and accused the opposition of misrepresenting the facts while amplifying the issue online.
Cholera, Hammanskraal and the blame game
Lesufi widened the attack beyond Tshwane. He said the DA was also in charge when people in Hammanskraal were dying of cholera, asking why the party did not raise the alarm in the same way then. He added that the DA governed Johannesburg when water and service issues were left unresolved.
The political fight has become a familiar one in Gauteng’s metros: each side blames the other for inherited infrastructure failures, rising tanker bills and the slow pace of fixes. Residents, meanwhile, are left waiting for reliable water.
In another recent DA intervention, the party called for urgent progress reports on the reintegration of Maluti-a-Phofung Water into the municipality, saying years of mismanagement had left the entity unable to meet basic obligations. In Tshwane, the immediate dispute remains the same one Lesufi and the DA keep circling: who appointed the contractors, who spent the money, and who answers when the taps stay dry.
