Fix for water woes: cut graft, build more dams and curb population growth
A CHILD dies, electrocuted. The mother is distraught, but admits to stealing electricity, being the recipient of one of a tangle of illegal connections.
We baulk at the proposed tariff increase of 30% by Eskom, but leaders of communities organise and encourage non-payment for water and electricity, and now we blame Eskom and the Guptas. The hazardous and illegal electricity connections are so rife and ubiquitous that they disfigure our skyline, especially evident on our high-definition television screens.
I read an article from an old SAMJ (SA Medical Journal) in a doctor’s waiting room on cervix cancer treatment at Tygerberg Hospital, an incidental statistic is that of 732 women treated, aged 25-59, had an average of 6.2 children, some mothers with 13 children.
As far as the water crisis in Cape Town is concerned, we have built six major dams with a joint capacity of 899 megalitre of water between 1928 and 2003.
But here is the rub: In the 50-year period between 1928 and 1978, five of the dams were built – a dam every 10 years – and in the 40-year period from 1978, only one dam was completed in 2003.
In 1978, the total capacity of the dams was such that each person had available, as an index, about 570 000 litres of water from summer to summer.
This declined from 570 000 to just 230 000 litres in 2018, and this decline has nothing to do with the drought, but everything with population growth in Cape Town – with the population doubling over the past 30 years from about 1.9 million to 3.8 million people.
Population doubling and a failure to build more dams over this period is responsible for the crisis. If we had three times more water available per person in 2018, we still would have had 36% usable water instead of 12% and the capacity of the dams would have been 46% or more, and not 22%. So, we can blame overpopulation on the one hand and central government’s inertia (failure to build more dams) and corruption (blame the Guptas and the government) on the other hand.
The problem is easy to fix: four more large dams, get the corruption money back and stop multiplying. Ben Smit Melkbosstrand