PETER BRUCE
Sea of opportunity in the Cape, Msholozi
If the people who matter are still concerned that Capetonians are not taking their water shortage seriously enough, they should take the advice of Magda Wierzycka, the billionaire fund manager who can quite often seem to be running the entire country, or at least telling it what to do.
They should, she has advised, give the Mother City the fright of its life and cut off the water one day next week. Keep it off for a morning. Tell the hospitals in advance. That’ll get their attention.
Sadly, it’ll also get the attention of the most important people in Cape Town – tourists. The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), the influential private-sector body that works to grow travel and tourism, reckons one in nine Capetonians works in or somehow services tourism, compared with one in 22 for the country as a whole.
It’s a big deal. For a start, tourism is an effortless export. Foreigners bring their money to
you. You sell them your hospitality, weather and the view. They have a good time and leave.
Everybody wins in tourism, and in Cape Town, the WTTC reckons almost 160,000 people worked in the sector in 2016.
Almost all those jobs are now in jeopardy as the city runs out of water. The local and national governments haven’t done their jobs properly, and for the DA, its main political currency – efficiency – is beginning to take on the hues of bitcoin; sometimes wonderful, sometimes not so good.
The debate about whether to use groundwater or desalination technology is beyond me. It seems the (outgoing, but not tonight Josephine) mayor, Patricia de Lille, favours groundwater.
The national water affairs minister and close Jacob Zuma ally, Nomvula Mokonyane, fancies desalination.
As a result of no one spotting the urgency that arises when the water is literally disappearing, schemes that were planned to come on stream in 2021 seem hopelessly late. There are bits and bobs happening: a small desalinator here, an aquifer there, and South African Breweries’ eternal Newlands spring come to mind. I don’t live in Cape Town and for once in my life I’m rather glad I don’t. I know people who come to Joburg to shower properly.
I’m afraid the only person who seems to be talking any sense in Cape Town now is Western Cape premier Helen Zille. We stopped talking to each other months ago because I criticised her for damaging DA leader Mmusi Maimane with her tweets about colonialism.
It is what it is, but like a real leader, she seems to have taken charge of what is clearly a condition of disaster.
Mokonyane at one stage wanted not only to construct a desalination plant near Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, but to give the job to a state-owned company, Umgeni Water. That would have been a corruption machine from the word go. The ANC is broke, according to the official record of its congress in December, and there’s an election in 2019.
We know how this goes. Umgeni would order a desalination plant from China (they already did that in Richards Bay). The order would go through an agent, who would take a huge fee which, after some individual distributions, would end up in the party’s coffers.
The minister’s desalination plant now seems to be off the table. In fact, following a visit to Cape Town by Mokonyane last weekend, it seems no national funding will be going Cape Town’s way at all, despite the fact that bulk water supply is a national competence.
That is just so stupid, because in the disaster lies a real opportunity. Zuma has been going on about his Operation Phakisa for years, particularly in finding or creating economic opportunity in the Oceans Economy.
Well, Mr President, there it is, right in front of you. If you Google (ask Duduzane) “desalination South Africa”, you’ll find a wealth of knowledge and technology already in the country. Use it. Create jobs. Crush the crisis.
Mokonyane’s instinct to use state entities to solve Cape Town’s problem is, sadly, typical of the Zuma years. The private sector is where the risk and the jobs should lie, not the state. As Zille says, there’s a water economy to build in and around Cape Town and, ultimately, the whole country. It could spark an entire economic recovery and make us the poster child for dealing with climate change.
If economic transformation is to be anything more than a political slogan, it has to be given form through actual work. There is huge infrastructure work to be done in water desalination, storage and reticulation that could energise the economy, and black industrialists in particular. You should be diverting money to Cape Town, Mr President, not withholding it.
Back to tourism. As I say, it is an effortless export. All you need to do is be nice to visitors. How hard can that be? And in SA, Cape Town is where they want to go. You should be doing everything in your power to make sure the city’s taps never run dry.
ZUMA HAS BEEN GOING ON ABOUT HIS OPERATION PHAKISA FOR YEARS, PARTICULARLY IN FINDING ECONOMIC PROSPECTS IN THE OCEANS ECONOMY