Civil organisations call for commission of inquiry into SA's water crisis

Civil organisations are calling for a commission of inquiry to get to the bottom of the country’s persistent water challenges.

The People’s Water Forum, a coalition of several like-minded civil organisations, held a media briefing at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg on Wednesday.

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The briefing came after a sustained period of water outages in many parts of Gauteng, with some areas going for weeks without supply.

While the water crisis has since subsided, the coordinator of the Joburg Crisis Alliance, Yunus Chamda, said there is a need to get to the root of the problem.

“As we’ve come to realise with the many commission of inquiries that we have is that it pulls away the layers of things that you never thought existed. Now with the water crisis, there’s this response and it’s all very superficial - government says we're going to do this and that - and if it’s water that comes back into the tap, do we just move on? What a commission would do, it would drill down deep, go beyond the surface to really understand how did we get here.”