Cities need ‘new normal’ policy

Wise leadership in water-scarce areas can lead to viable turnaround strategies

SOME YEARS ago, I warned of what I called the “Uhuru Decade”. This is the moment in the post-liberation history of any African country where the infrastructure starts to collapse because of the purging of skilled technocrats in the euphoria of perceived victory.

That warning triggered the unbridled anger of the ruling elite, and I found myself purged from the CSIR as a result.

But we must never let a good crisis go to waste. What lessons can we learn from the unfolding crisis in the water sector?

The most important lesson is that we are now transitioning to a new era of uncertainty. I call this Business Unusual, in which all assumptions of the past are no longer relevant.

The New Normal is about dealing with the finite constraints of scarcity. Central to this is the need for policy reform that reflects this harsh reality. The drought is not temporary – it’s part of the New Normal. The reason is simple.

It’s not about water… It’s about population dependent on water. This is called the hydraulic density of population, also known as water crowding. Population migration and growth in South Africa have simply outstripped available water supply made worse by climate change.

But a wise man once taught me that “a man can live for weeks without food, days without water, but not for a moment without hope”. He was a Holocaust survivor, so he knew about those things first-hand.

To shift from despair to hope, all we need is for the ruling party to say three simple things with conviction and often: “Our economy is water-constrained. Our future lies in the technology of water recovery. Our target for water recycling is 1.6 by 2035.”

If this simple act of leadership occurs, then we can turn this disaster around. In fact, the economy will thrive, because water scarcity is a technological constraint, not a biophysical constraint.

Our national water policy reform needs to be centred on three core elements, in my professional opinion.

The first is recovery of water from waste. We produce around 5 000 megalitres a day of sewage. Each citizen produces around 100 litres of recoverable effluent daily.

That’s over 5 billion litres of water that can be recovered safely for re-use elsewhere in the economy.

The second is desalination of seawater for the coastal cities. Significantly, desalination technology is similar to that needed for recovering water from waste, so this is synergy at work.

The third is managed aquifer recharge in which water is stored underground where it is safe from the ravages of evaporation.

Once we have made this simply policy choice, we will start to grow our national economy, restore investor confidence and deliver on the hope of democracy that burned so fiercely in our hearts in 1994.

Flowing logically from this policy reform process will be what I call a dual stream reticulation economy.

This means that water of different quality and price will be used for different purposes. Does it make sense to flush a toilet with potable water? Or to cool machinery in a factory with potable water? Or to make bricks with potable water? Clearly not.

The current hot spots to monitor are Cape Town, Port Shepstone and Gauteng. In Cape Town, the municipal leadership is waking up to this new reality and starting to talk of Business Unusual, desalination and aquifer storage and recovery. They are now at the leading edge of change for good.

Port Shepstone is the epicentre of an unfolding tragedy in which the Murchison Hospital is likely to become the next Esidimeni, all things being equal. Here we have a failing state at local level, unable to adapt.

In Gauteng, we will remain waterinsecure until 2025 simply because the Department of Water and Sanitation has failed to implement its own findings about desalinating saline sewage and mine water, and bringing Phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands Project online in time. Gauteng will therefore go through the Cape Town crisis over the next decade.

Wise leadership in Gauteng will recognise this and actively start to do something positive. Once policy reform has happened, and clear signals are being sent out about technology, we suddenly have an investor-friendly environment in which solutions that are technologically robust, socially acceptable and economically viable start to emerge. This becomes the driver of a whole new type of economy. A place where jobs can be created, legitimate aspirations can be reached, and lost confidence can again be restored.

The major lesson to be learnt is that the outcome need not be a catastrophe. On the contrary, once Cape Town has implemented a coherent turnaround strategy, it will thrive once again. Other cities, with leadership unable to comprehend the reality of the New Normal, will at best survive, but never thrive.

The choice is ours. We, the people, get the future we allow to happen.

Turton is professor at the Centre for Environmental Management, University of the Free State.