Still waiting for some incredibly serious thunderbolts out of blue
ON WEDNESDAY I attended Mmusi Maimane’s #DefeatDayZero briefing in Cape Town.
And I am happy to report that it was an informative, inspiring and reassuring presentation – for somewhere in the first half of May 2017.
Speaking to a capacity audience, some of whom were even there on purpose, Maimane started by explaining that “this is not a human disaster, it’s a natural disaster”.
While this was cold comfort to all the humans in the audience worried about running out of water, it must have been a massive relief to the various humans in local government jobs who have been worrying about getting fingered for their role in this roiling omnishambles.
After all, is anyone really to blame for a natural disaster?
How did we get here? That’s easy. We know that this crisis arose because the provincial government didn’t react quickly enough to the fact that the national government wasn’t reacting at all, and that it is mostly the fault of Patricia de Lille, who is completely blameless, the real villain being Helen Zille, who tried to tackle the crisis years ago and also ignored it until it was too late. (Also climate change and science, but I concede that it’s fantastically unrewarding having a Facebook fight with a data set and a graph so I don’t expect you to get worked up about that.)
The most important thing we know for sure, however, is that we don’t know anything for sure.
But far from sidestepping responsibility, however, Maimane was about to step right in it.
Expressing his displeasure at how the City had handled communications until now, he revealed that he had “taken the unprecedented step of taking political control of our respective government’s responses to the situation”.
As he outlined the team that would actually be handling the crisis (Ian Neilson and Xanthea Limberg will hold your hand and say “Please, dear?” up until Day Zero, after which Helen Zille will point at your tears and order you to stop wasting water out of your eyeballs), it become clear that “political control” is something that should not be confused with administrative control or remote control or mind control – in fact any kind of control over anything whatsoever.
But this didn’t stop some people from getting quite upset.
That morning, a Cape Town newspaper had led with a story accusing Maimane of hijacking the crisis for political gain.
That afternoon, pundits and recyclers of punditry worried that he was blurring the lines between party and state.
(I’m glad we have legal minds keeping us safe from line-blurrers, but with all due respect to the Constitution, I think right about now Cape Town would give the keys of the city to any dictator, benevolent or not, who could guarantee flushing toilets on April 13.)
For some, however, the problem wasn’t political but practical.
Maimane’s TED-ish talk had promised new information, but it all seemed depressingly familiar.
Still, at least it was nice and clear, arranged around the themes of “Where we are at”, “What we are doing” and “What we all need to do”.
In case you were still unsure, where we are at is 70-ish days from somewhere we don’t want to be.
What we (the City) are doing is stuff that won’t avert Day Zero 2018 but which might help avoid the 2019 and 2020 editions.
And finally, what we all need to do is limit our water usage to 50 litres per day. And that’s that.