Stop the ‘gimme’ with water

Access to water is a basic human right, right? Sort of. In fact, it’s not even mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Think about that next time you flush.

You’d think this was a serious omission, but presumably nobody even thought about it: along with access to air, it surely seemed that water was a no-brainer.

After all, so many other basic human rights are tied up with water – chiefly, the right to life – so why would you even write it down?

Only in 2010 did the UN General Assembly declare it explicitly.

However, access to unlimited water is not a right: how could it be, when only 3% of the planet’s water is actually drinkable?

In light of the Cape Town situation (and the Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal, and the ongoing Johannesburg situation that everyone seems to have forgotten about) SA could do with waking up to this truth.

As the Joburg council stated recently: “Water usage has increased at an alarming rate.”

But, oh, how we still like to play the blame game.

Look at Cape Town: blame the local DA government; blame the national ANC government; blame political point-scoring; blame the farmers and industries; blame the wine-drinkers; blame the citizens who shrugged when asked to conserve water, who said “the rain will come,” even when it did not.

Now everyone’s demanding more storage dams, more groundwater pumping, more desalination, more, more, more…

Yet here’s the problem: we need fewer solutions because the more water we have, the more we use, the more we demand.

Not only are man-made solutions unsustainable in the long term, with urban populations growing and rainfall becoming more erratic, but they actually increase demand for water.

Instead we must learn to use less water, permanently.

I speak as someone who lives mostly in Ireland, the “emerald isle” known for its rain, as a woman who washes her hair daily, yet who lived through SA’s seemingly endless drought in the eighties …

How quickly we forget that water flowing freely from a tap is a luxury. In truth, drought is the norm. If we want a future, we can no longer use water as if it simply falls from the sky – even when it does.