Let everyone pay

FEW politicians can look much beyond their next election. Long-term planning isn’t their thing.

Years ago, Cape Town had a city engineer and a city electrical engineer, both highly qualified and experienced.

One of their jobs was to plan for the future of things like roads, water, electricity, waste disposal and so on.

It is as a result of their excellent services that Cape Town is blessed with the facilities it has.

It’s far too late to seek solutions to the fuss, panic and flap attending what is called the worst drought in history.

This is nonsense: we have had many droughts over the past century and we survived all of them.

We are not short of water – we are oversupplied with consumers and the shortfall is being exacerbated by a three-year reduction in rainfall.

To really assess the problem, we would need to know the bulk water supplied to the “leafy suburbs” of Constantia and so on.

One would also need to know how much water is being supplied, free of charge, to the various townships around the city.

Three possible long-term solutions might be:

To dust off and reconsider the plans drawn up in the 1970s for a dam on the Palmiet River just before it reaches the sea.

As a matter of urgency set about removing the silt on the bottom of all of our major dams and, as far as possible, to increase their effective depth so that when the rains do come – as they will – we are ready to receive and store as much water as possible.

To firmly decide that everyone in Cape Town must pay for water and not merely those who live in the “leafy suburbs”. Nothing saves water better than the knowledge that each litre costs money. This tariff should apply to everyone living here.

The alternative is social upheaval and disaster. John Logan Kenilworth