Johannesburg’s escalating water crisis is a symptom of years of municipal neglect and mismanagement under the ANC, leaving the city teetering on the edge of collapse. To restore stability, innovative water recycling and desalination strategies are essential, but only a decisive leadership change promises true recovery.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
There are still surprised yelps being emitted by some Jo’burg residents over the water cut-offs. These will subside as the water crisis becomes general and permanent. Jo’burgers will then have to face up to life in a dying city. For there can be no doubt that Jo’burg is dying, killed by decades of ANC theft and mismanagement. Recovery is still not impossible but for that to happen either Ramaphosa or the electorate would need to evict the local ANC from power permanently. There will be – there already are – anguished cries about water being a constitutional and human right – but that will do no good at all. The whole of Gauteng will be affected by the spreading crisis and the government will have to decide what to do. Will it simply allow the financial and economic heart of the national economy to collapse ? If so, all hopes of faster economic growth disappear. The question then becomes how big a hit would the economy sustain – minus 5 per cent? minus 10 per cent ? Which would mean millions more unemployed. What is clear is that the government cannot treat this as merely a provincial problem. It is a national calamity of the first magnitude.
Pemmy Majodina, the minister for Water and Sanitation, has been admirably frank, saying that this is a crisis which the Gauteng municipalities have chosen to have. (Though, to be fair, the appalling damage done by Nomvula Mokonyane when she had Majodina’s job deserves to be top of the list.) It is true enough that year after year the municipalities have underspent on maintenance, have starved the infrastructure of investment, haven’t even tried to fix all the leaking pipes or to do anything about all the illegal water connections. In other words this is is an ANC self-made crisis.
There are times when you feel the GNU isn’t being taken seriously enough. One remembers David Makhura saying that if it didn’t work “we’re all finished”. There spoke a man who had truly looked into the pit and understood the gravity of the situation. Now it beggars belief that Ramaphosa is serenely sailing towards the December 15 date when the time limit is up on the BELA clauses. It looks as if he is willing to sacrifice the GNU and all its works for the principle that school parents shouldn’t be allowed to exercise their preferences for their children to be taught in their home language. When one considers the gravity of the water crisis it is quite surreal that anyone would risk the GNU – the best hope of solving any and every crisis – for something like that.
Minister Majodina is quite right. But the national government is far from faultless. If you go back to the 1990s you find ludicrous legal debates about making water a human right. And indeed this happened, despite water experts all pointing out that South Africa was a dry country in which water was anything but free. But this was allowed to pass along with other similar legal nonsense. Then we had a lengthy period of Kader Asmal playing to the gallery by increasing water supplies to communities all over the country. There was nothing wrong about that but it was the same story as with electricity, where similarly large numbers of new connections were made. All very nice but no attempt was made to increase supply in either case. The results were obvious and completely predictable.
Seeing what was going on the Helen Suzman Foundation (of which I was then the Director) decided to hold a conference on water security and we invited experts from all over Africa as well as local South Africans. Kader Asmal was furious. He declared that he, and he alone, would make policy on water and all the South African participants were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they dared to attend the conference. In the end it had to be cancelled as local water experts regretfully pulled out, saying they dared not risk their families’ financial security by annoying Kader. Ultimately I had to apologise to foreign delegates and send them back home. Asmal had the brazen cheek to write to me saying that if we wanted to discuss water, he would provide our agenda and he would nominate our speakers. He simply had no democratic instincts at all, his view being blocked by his own enormous ego.
In fact, the government should – years ago – have exerted pressure on all municipalities to capture, clean and recycle all their waste water. This is done quite normally not only in dry neighbours like Namibia and Botswana but even in London. Any glass of water you drink in London has been re-used six times. With climate change certain to shrink our water supplies, we need to use our water far more intensively. Secondly, we need all the help we can get from Israel, the world leader in maximising water use. South Africa is lucky to have huge oceans to east and west, plus lots of cheap solar energy. We could make huge strides with desalination.
In order to maximise our re-use of waste water we would need a lot more sewage treatment plants. It is a disgrace that right round the South African coast raw sewage is discharged straight into the sea. This is how beaches get ruined by ecoli and our tourist industry gets blighted. It also has bad results on marine life. It is a barbaric practice.
We also need to grasp the nettle of communal land tenure. This is ruining the land and causing advancing desertification. Communal land means no one is responsible and so no one looks after the land. Sheep, cattle and goats (over-) graze at will, the land is stripped of cover, its water retention capacity falls and we end up with the hard-baked dusty land in which poor rural Africans scrabble a subsistence living at best.
Drive up through the Eastern Cape or into Northern KwaZulu-Natal. Cheek by jowl you find any amount of that ruined, donga-infested communal land side by side with lush green commercial farms showing just how fruitful that land can be when treated properly. It’s all very well talking about African tradition but do we want to stay stuck in the stone age until the land is all ruined ? What we want to see is a whole new class of African small farmers and market gardeners helping to feed the cities. This has happened in Kenya. It could happen here.
Water management under apartheid became increasingly sophisticated. Large dams were built and there were mechanisms for inter-basin exchange so that excess rainfall in some parts of the country (read: KwaZulu-Natal) could be transferred to dry areas. For the fact is that the drier the country, the more it needs hydrological expertise and long-term investment. This was disregarded after 1994. Water boards were treated as part of the ANC’s patronage empire which saw grossly unsuitable and unqualified people appointed to boards, some of whom were also grossly corrupt. This culminated in the appointment of Nomvula Mokonyane as Water minister, clearly the worst person ever to hold that job.
In fact the opposite should have happened. After 1994 the ANC was careful to shield the National Treasury and the central bank from the normal excesses of affirmative action. It was understood that these institutions were utterly crucial to the whole economy and that it was essential to maintain a higher intellectual and, dare one say it, ethical standard in their case or the whole system could quickly go to hell. Of course, Zuma and the Guptas were intent on pillaging those institutions just as they had pillaged everything else, but they met tough resistance. They managed to ruin the revenue service, SARS, but the Treasury and the Reserve Bank held out.
In a country as dry as South Africa, clearly threatened both by climate change and population growth, it should have been obvious that water management needed to be put on the same sacrosanct basis as the Treasury and the Reserve Bank. Water is, after all, a matter of life and death. No country can afford to put the likes of Nomvula Mokonyane in charge of such a precious resource.
Already Afriforum has declared that the Gauteng premier, Panyaza Lesufi, must go, that he bears overall responsibility for this crisis and that there’s no solution which includes him. Lesufi would be sensible to think hard about this. Gauteng includes the biggest single population of Afrikaners in the country, Afriforum’s key constituency. Afriforum is also well aware that Lesufi is the principal enemy of Afrikaans education. And Afriforum has considerable muscle. As water runs out in more and more of Gauteng, tempers will rise and Lesufi’s predictably populist response will inflame rather than soothe the situation. He could be in for a very uncomfortable ride.
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