Current disaster was predicted years ago

THE news pages have been filled with the water crisis now upon us.

Our elected representatives in a close approximation to a dogfight, have turned on each other with a viciousness that beggars description and, hyena-like, various opposition politicians have been gathering around to pick up the scraps.

Every one of our representatives, national, provincial and local, are complicit in the disaster. All have had the preventative solution in their reach, but chose to ignore it, be it for venality or incompetence or both.

The latest excuse is that nobody could have known. Rubbish. There has been an elephant in the room for at least a decade but nobody in authority has paid it any heed. Three years ago I was in the audience comprising elected representatives, the public and municipal “experts” at a presentation by Israeli scientists and water authorities about what lay ahead.

One of the points made is there was no time to lose if we were to avoid a catastrophe. Everything they warned about has come to pass, but none of the measures to combat the crisis has been looked at, until now. It may be too late. In desperation, the city has turned on the ratepayers.

Nobody seemed to realise that when you have more and more people in a defined area, you amplify the impact that each person can have on resources. If left unrestrained, untempered by any kind of conservation and planning ethic, it will become a destructive force.

The population of Cape Town has increased fourfold in the past 20 years. We have seen a reshaping of the biosphere and ecological system to a point where Mother Nature is altering the physical and climatic conditions of the Western Cape. And our councillors do nothing but fight each other.