A drought in our leadership

NOBODY seems to be taking our water crisis very seriously. As day zero – the unimaginable day when Cape Town’s taps run dry – draws closer, there is at least a greater awareness that water is a scarce resource.

And yet, we do little about it, forever hoping that the heavens will open up and rescue us from our own obduracy.

Some have blamed politicking to be at the heart of Cape Town and the rest of the Western Cape’s drought crisis.

The DA maintains the national ANC government has done little to help it at its moment of inevitable crisis. But the truth is that the Department of Water and Sanitation, with minister Nomvula Mokonyane at the helm, has become notorious for its careless disregard of its legal mandate as the “public trustee” of our water resources.

Indeed, her department has been of little assistance to any drought-stricken provinces and their affected municipalities, including areas, such as the Eastern Cape, where the ANC dominates.

Has she forgotten that the Water Act makes it her department’s exclusive responsibility to ensure water is “protected, used, developed, conserved, managed and controlled in a sustainable and equitable manner, for the benefit of all persons”?

Municipalities carry the responsibility to clean and get the water to the end users. She plays no oversight role whatsoever when our municipalities fail us in this regard. Indeed Buffalo City Municipality does not even heed Mdantsane citizens’ pleas to stop water leaks in the water-scarce area.

What happened to the ambitious national plan announced in 2015 involving the “War on Water Leaks”? Nothing at all it seems.

The truth is that Mokonyane’s department is moribund. And a moribund water department is the last thing one needs in a crisis that has struck at the heart of this country’s economy.

As “trustee” of our water, it has allowed our rivers and dams to be polluted, our wetlands to be overrun by water-sucking alien vegetation, our purest groundwater to be rendered unusable through acid and other contamination from mines. It has failed to police massive theft of water by agriculture and other industries.

It has allowed illegal boreholes to spring up all over the country.

Civil society group South African Water Caucus says mismanagement, corruption and spiraling debt blight this department’s ability to deliver. The Auditor-General found unauthorised expenditure to the tune of R406-million and said it achieved just 28% of its targets in 2016-17.

But the nigh criminal disregard national, provincial and local government have for our scarce water resources is mirrored by us, the citizens of this arid country.

In Cape Town, it is estimated that 50% of users have completely ignored entreaties to conserve water. We are the victims of our own inability to change. But if we don’t change and force our government to truly take on the responsibility as public trustee of our water, we are in trouble.

As Western Cape premier Helen Zille recently said: “Save water as if your life depends on it. Because it does”.