Watershed moment for democracy
In a middle-class suburb in Johannesburg this week, a husband and wife duo took turns climbing a ladder with a bucket of water to wash each other’s hair. Nearby, another resident took to her swimming pool for a cleansing splash as large parts of the city and suburbs were left without water for the better part of the week. Not for the first time, residents were experiencing what many other people in other parts of the country have had to endure, sometimes for weeks and months.
Water tankers have become a familiar sight on our suburban roads, where once they were confined to rural areas. At the heart of the water crisis lies the familiar toxic mixture of incompetence, lack of accountability, squandered resources and refusal to pay bills that has sounded the death knell for effective and accountable local government. Little wonder that the water crisis is emerging as a threat to social stability, because while electricity blackouts can be survived in most cases, water is essential for life.
It is alarming that the situation has been allowed to deteriorate to the extent that water woes are joining the near-collapse of Eskom and Transnet as existential threats to the democratic project, inhibiting growth and putting even more people out of work. There has been talk of Johannesburg weaning its water infrastructure off its reliance on Eskom power. Yet when one considers that our first “rolling blackouts” occurred in 2008, it has taken an awful long time for water authorities to wake up to a solution.
Water provision needs to be prioritised. A situation in which 40% of Johannesburg’s water is wasted or stolen cannot be allowed to endure. Nor can the decrepit state of our waterworks around the country be allowed to become the new normal. If the solution in transport logistics and energy provision is seen to lie in involving business, we need to move with great urgency to get what help we can from the private sector.
For the rich and middle classes, who can install rooftop solar, their next expense will be boreholes and JoJo tanks. For the rest, though, who rely on state entities for their water, the future looks bleak unless we wake up to the clear danger that water uncertainty has brought to the surface.