Water crisis is a manufactured tyranny of scarcity
There is nothing like a good crisis to galvanise entrepreneurs. Where there may have been a market before, they now perceive customers ready and anxious to fork out whatever it takes to make the crisis go away.
Or so it seems in SA, where entrepreneurial anticipation is roughly in proportion to governmental inaction.
Consider SA’s recurring water crisis. The private sector response to the sight of driedup dams is to offer alternative sources of raw water on the assumption that more is possible. The result is a series of diluted emergency pop-ups, all making prices on the back of perceived scarcity.
Pure rent seeking, say the statists, and they roll out more white monopoly capital drivel while business claims the state is derelict in its duty and gorges on the carcasses of failure.
In each instance, the entities that must deliver a permanent solution maintain a mutual distrust and dig themselves into ever-deepening ideological trenches. The rhetoric reflects a degree of truth though, making it that much more difficult to deliver water or to make an honest profit from the service, while Day Zero arrives as regional health crises and localised economic distress.
This is because the thinking about water is stuck in what water expert Prof Anthony Turton calls a paradigm of scarcity. It means the parties that can deliver a solution are mired in a tussle over who gets to exploit scarcity; business does it for profit and the government does it for power.
Instead, says Turton, the thinking should shift to a paradigm of abundance, which means water is never lost or wasted. It may be elsewhere or contaminated or delayed, and towns and countries may become desiccated when the flow passes them by, but water is not scarce. The fact is, although the volume of water is finite, in flow it is abundant.
But Prof Mike Muller, a former commissioner at the National Planning Commission, writes in the Cape Messenger that SA’s water depends on rainfall, which implies that with average rainfall at 450ml a year (about half the global average of 860ml), water must be treated as a scarce commodity and that it can, somehow, be saved up.
The main variable, however, is not rainfall. It is hydraulic density of population, or the number of people per unit of water measured over time, which, if factored appropriately, views water in a state of flow.
The consequence of scarcity is hoarding disguised as conservation, or rent-seeking by another name. It means that who controls the water holds the power. Consider Rand Water’s muscle flexing last week when it choked the water supply to Emfuleni south of Johannesburg by 60% over payment arrears. The consequence was that highlying areas had no water at all.
The supply to Emfuleni was restored, but it was a Day Zero nonetheless, whether residents in high-lying areas paid their bills or not.
This kind of manufactured water crisis is about to occur in at least 30 areas across SA. The Department of Water and Sanitation has notified 30 municipalities that its water supplies will be cut off on December 8 if they don’t pay up. The department is owed R10.7bn, with 73% of this amount outstanding for longer than 60 days.
It means millions of people will experience scarcity, whether they have paid their bills or not and whether the dams are full or not. Citizens will die because they are being held collectively responsible for the failure of municipalities.
SA’s water crisis is caused by a tyranny of scarcity.
If there is opportunity (and a duty) it is not to be found in the pitiful attempts to make and hoard water but to ensure that the water SA has will flow to everyone who needs it.