Thirst of one, thirst of all
THE water crisis in the Western Cape presents all of us – whether we live in the province or other parts of the country – with a small window of opportunity to re-evaluate our relationship with water.
The crisis is also a metaphor for the commodification of our commons – in this case, water.
But this extends also to our food, our farmlands and our environment. This crisis is above all an opportunity for us, as citizens of the country, to take back our power we handed over to the politicians and political parties since the dawn of our democracy.
Now we have multiple crises at every sphere of government – local, provincial and national.
Irrespective of the party of our choice, we have sunk into a crisis of economy, ecology, energy and a lack of political accountability.
How we respond to this water crisis will determine whether we have access to water as a commons – shared equitably by all, or water commodified, privatised and only available to the wealthy.
The Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) is a site of multiple commons: the value of its land, food and water should accrue to us all. The PHA is a place of production – 6 000 jobs, 200 000 tons of vegetables per annum – and also a place of immense potential: jobs and production can double. Water can be regenerated from three waste water facilities nearby via Managed Aquifer Recharge.
We have compiled an evidence base of the City of Cape Town (CoCT) government’s failure to invest – since at least 1990 – in mass infrastructure necessary to meet the growing water demands of a growing city.
We have the lived experience since 2009 of a relentless assault on the Philippi Horticultural Area – the primary recharge zone of the Cape Flats Aquifer.
As a direct result of this austerity approach, the CoCT has produced what it is calling a “crisis” denoted by the fear-mongering expression “Day Zero”.
The confusion and helplessness intended to be produced by this tactic is part of a larger strategy to allow certain elements in the CoCT to suddenly force through enormous large-scale infrastructure spend – namely desalination plants – the planning for which has been going on in the shadows for some time.
We note specifically the CoCT is over-privileging a fossil-fuel based technology that is in itself guaranteed to commodify water. The primary beneficiaries of a sudden and unconsulted swerve into the nuclear scale infrastructure spend on desalination are not Capetonians.
The PHA Campaign is also investigating the commercial interests of the individuals and companies primed to benefit from this move, in particular the pointed shunning of local firms.
The PHA Campaign recognises this emphasis as yet another instance of the colonial-settler governance practice favoured by the City government.
Desalination is regressive – its cost will be borne disproportionately by the poor, and its technologies are already outmoded and superseded by more sustainable and environmentally proactive methods of water conservation.
This programme is yet another indicator of how the CoCT privileges imported governance structures ill-adapted to the fragile ecology of the Western Cape. The motive is not protection or provision of water, but profit from its supposed scarcity.
Part of settler-colonial governance is to privilege “solutions” produced “elsewhere” by “experts” whose supposed knowledge of the problem, as defined by the CoCT, is rated superior to local knowledge. We draw the attention of Capetonians to this undermining tactic of the powerful.
The CoCT called for local input to propose solutions to its manufactured crisis. This was merely a public relations exercise. No consultation with local communities took place.
Genuine approaches by the citizens of Cape Town are undermined by officials’ belief that they can continue to lie to and manipulate the responses of ordinary citizens into a tick box ratification of plans long solidified.
This is called epistemicide – the killing of local knowledge. It is part of the array of settler-colonial tactics used globally to suppress local participation in decision-making. It is intended to allow the CoCT to continue to undermine and ultimately erase both indigenous expertise, community experience and any locally informed solutions driven by city dwellers.
In this way, the CoCT reinforces its existing privileging of the wealthy in the city, and foreign investors and tourists. Evidence from cities such as Los Angeles warns that people in these categories will be protected from the ill effects of the water crisis for a price they will be willing and able to pay.
The CoCT deliberately continues to exploit differences between the haves and the havenots in the assumption that the generation of revenue will receive more recognition and gain more traction than the regeneration of shared well-being.
The breath-taking cynicism of this approach is already abundantly clear in other CoCT decision-making that harms the poor.
The PHA Campaign rejects settler-colonial governance. We reject the manipulation and fear tactics of those in power, and we refuse to be distracted by the CoCT’s spectacular performance of a fabricated “water crisis”; whose resolution we are now being told “does not lie in our hands”.
We reclaim our city and its commons, starting with the PHA Food & Farming Campaign to preserve the Philippi Horticultural Area as a precious resource for the recharge of the Cape Flats Aquifer.
We reject cynical efforts to manipulate Capetonians along the historical fault-lines that scar our city. We recognise the shared spirit beginning to unite this city. Ordinary people are showing great creativity in their efforts to support water conservation and share tactics for living wisely with water.
This solidarity shows that Capetonians are aware of an unprecedented opportunity to change the conversation.
The PHA Campaign invites this change to focus on a basis of mutual care.
We reject the suddenness of the CoCT’s decision to return to implementing mass infrastructure projects in the form of desalination plants.
Decades have now passed in which opportunities to upgrade and maintain water infrastructure were deliberately missed. The CoCT has thus proven itself an unreliable partner in any infrastructure endeavour.
Its wilful lack of vision and action in the past disqualifies it from the right to decide how to proceed now.
Water is life. Water is dignity. The thirst of one is the thirst of all. Rich and poor alike, we need our City’s water system to function optimally.
As a heterogeneous community of Capetonians, we claim our constitutional right to the protection of the land above the Cape Flats Aquifer (CPA), and its water within.
We reject the CoCT’s tactics of “slow violence”; which take the form of privatisation of the land, failure to enforce the Rule of Law, and similar crisis-producing forms of intentional neglect.
These are violent tactics to force those who live and work on or around the PHA to become complicit in its destruction-for-profit, even though there will ultimately be no benefit to them.
We stand between the CoCT and the voiceless proletariat who will lose their livelihoods and relationships with the land and those who work it when working farms are sold to “developers”.
We also speak for the voiceless and irreplaceable animal, bird, insect and aquatic life that cannot live without the PHA farmland ecosystem.
Accordingly, we claim the PHA as a site of renewal, reconciliation between people and the commons, innovation and activism for all.
Our Mother City has been a site of settler-colonial experimentation for close to five centuries. That time is over. We will find local solutions based on local knowledge and observations of the magnificent synergies between land and water visible in the PHA.
We will continue to propose solutions that are practical, honour the land and all who live here, do not “cost the earth” and, most importantly, are based in the engagement and innovation of everyone who calls themselves Capetonian.
Join the PHA Campaign to reclaim your food and reclaim your water. Be the change your City needs.