Politicians should steer clear of our water shortage
IWAS not particularly flattered or impressed to receive a recorded telephone call from the leader of the DA, Mmusi Maimane, telling me his party was taking over the management of Cape Town’s water crisis. I did not think for one moment: “gosh, I am honoured to receive a personal call from a great leader”.
Like everybody else who received the recorded message, I just sighed and pressed “delete”.
I do not consider politicians the best people to manage droughts any more than I feel blacksmiths should be made responsible for brain surgery or chiropodists to be the best people to design moon rockets. Water management should be tackled by engineers, meteorologists, surveyors, plumbers and planners.
When politicians climb on a bandwagon and tell us “their party” is the one that can save us from Day Zero, many of us simply become irritated. It’s such blatant point-scoring I wonder whether anybody is stupid enough to fall for it. All it does is make ordinary people hate politicians.
I know nobody who has a particularly high opinion of politicians of any party. I doubt whether there has ever been an era in human history where politicians have been as universally despised and scorned as they are now. And it’s not only in our country. I have friends in other countries who gloomily claim their politicians are even worse than ours.
Politicians cannot make it rain, they cannot build dams or install pipelines. Their political opponents did not cause the climate to change any more than they can change it back again. Why do they think they can manage a water shortage?
Ordinary people have to deal with the reality of the water scarcity. Everybody I know is making plans to save water, buy rainwater tanks, dig boreholes, queue to collect water from springs and re-use every drop of water. We save our dishwater to flush our toilets and we do our laundry only half as often as we did before. We no longer take baths. We shower sparingly. We no longer wash our cars. We share water saving hints. All the politicians seem to do is accuse each other of corruption and fight bitter verbal battles while being paid handsomely by the taxpayers who begrudge them every cent we pay. We are not getting value for our tax rands.
Usually national crises like wars, tornadoes, floods and famine, serve to unite nations. People stand together to face a common enemy. We have a serious national crisis on our hands and all it seems to have done is bring out the worst in our leaders. Have we lost our way?
Last Laugh
Joe was looking gloomy in the bar when his pal Dave asked what the matter was.
“I won two tickets to the rugby cup final match,” he said, “including free transport, free accommodation in a five-star hotel for a week and unlimited free Champagne. Now I discover it’s on the same day I am scheduled to be married so I have to find somebody to take it all over from me.”
“Wow!” said Dave. “I certainly wouldn’t mind taking over from you.”
Joe brightened up immediately. “Would you really? Hey, thanks Dave. It’s on Saturday, June 23, in St Mary’s Church in Paarl at 2pm and her name is Brenda. She’ll be the one in white.”