Deaf government has left it too late to fix SA’s water crisis
Once a year, SA’s engineers throw a breakfast gathering for the media during which they convey a strong message: technology will save the country from everything, including the water crisis— and engineers have the technology to do it.
Nothing wrong with that, as spin goes. It is quite efficient and effective.
In 2018, Consulting Engineers SA (Cesa) president Neresh Pather said National Treasury must create a directorate for infrastructure because, well, the way state procurement for infrastructure projects was being handled led to bad things.
Pather did not quite call it “state capture”, but the nation knows procurement is the means and motivation for state capture. Cesa, too, has its eye on the government’s chronically delayed R4-trillion infrastructure plan for the next 15 years, which might give it more cause to deplore the depths to which SA has sunk.
IN UGU, A PERI-URBAN SPRAWL IN KWAZULU-NATAL, DAY ZERO HAS PREVAILED FOR TWO YEARS
During question time, the discussion got specific. Asked about the Cape’s water crisis, Pather quickly remedied certain misconceptions. First, water was not just a Cape Town problem, but a national emergency. Second, SA’s perennial and frequent droughts were not to blame, but inadequate infrastructure was. Third, SA possesses the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to reverse the crisis, even if it meant dragging away retired white (even male) engineers from their fishing spots countrywide.
Cesa does have a point beyond the R14-trillion motivator. Day Zero happens across the country all the time. In urban townships, it happens when municipalities cannot pay their water bills. And in Limpopo, tenderpreneurs scooted with the cash without laying a pipe. In the Eastern Cape, all three tiers of government have simply been taken by surprise by a drought. In North West and the Free State, more often than not, there are no cogent explanations.
In Ugu, a peri-urban sprawl of a million people in KwaZulu-Natal, where Day Zero has prevailed for two years, people die not of thirst, but of disease. When this is interrogated, the cause of death could be listed as “hepatitis A”, not “oral transfer of faecal matter”. But even if the life-saving value of hand washing is understood among people who must haul what little safe water is available to them under their own muscle power, it is an unaffordable luxury.
When Cesa calls for the creation of a directorate for infrastructure, it does so because it will give engineers the ear of the government so it may hear their technical solutions to the technical problems related to infrastructure. This idea was prompted by the fact that over the past three years, during which the water crisis had become acute, its many appeals for an audience with the authorities were ignored.
Cesa demands to be heard, and rightly so, but, regrettably, that opportunity is now lost. It is just too late. When SA’s water problems were technical, their technical solutions would have been apt, but if the government now suddenly finds itself shamed into an adult conversation with the nerd herd, nothing will come of it save self-congratulatory references to “consultation”.
It means SA’s infrastructure crises will continue to mount and a great many more people will suffer and die — not because of the actions of microbes, but because of the inaction of the people empowered and charged with preventing pathogenesis.
In the same way, the three governmental tiers charged with preventing the Cape’s crisis are now suffering analysis paralysis; nothing technical will get done in time to prevent Day Zero unless the layers of government first acknowledge that they are the problem, that the crisis is mostly a function of organisational dysfunction.
Only with that out of the way will the technical solutions proposed by engineers get the hearing they deserve.
Only when elected officials trade their shameless entitlement to rule for the humility of duty can they expect compliance and cooperation from citizens. Now that Day Zero seems inevitable, self-preservation will trump the increasingly doubtful likelihood of the success of a cooperative national effort.
A breakdown in the trust relationship between the government and citizens means people will refuse to be governed. That is anarchy. Countrywide, it will make Cape Town’s Day Zero literally look like a picnic.