South Africa is a remarkable place. We can argue among ourselves with such heat and righteous vitriol that to any foreign observer it might seem as if we are a country ready to wage war with itself, especially in the personally removed atmosphere of X.
But the tendency of speaking out and remaining unbowed is what gives me hope that the country will last well beyond the gloomy forecast of RW Johnson, the brilliant analyst and late and last true curmudgeon.
Take the water sector as the most recent example. I first became acutely aware of the pending crisis in the sector after meeting Anthony Turton in 2008 when he was a guest on the late David Gleason’s radio programme State of the Nation to explain why the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) had shown him the door.
Turton has a colourful history in his role in the apartheid state spy machinery. He has forged a career in hydrological science in the years since the dawn of democracy after accepting full responsibility for his actions as a soldier-turned-peacemaker, which is detailed in his book Shaking Hands with Billy. I suspect his past meant he was never truly trusted by the new administration.
As one of the council’s leading specialists on water politics, Turton had prepared a presentation that warned of a looming water crisis. But the paper was pulled from the CSIR’s Science Real & Relevant conference. The official explanation — that senior executives believed his reference to the “uhuru decade”, accompanied by images of public violence, would offend some in the liberation movement — was extraordinary.
Unbowed, Turton then poured his energy into raising the alarm wherever he could. He and I worked together for several years on the establishment of the country’s first-ever conference to unpack the risks inherent in the emerging thinking around water, energy and food security — what became known as the water-energy-food nexus. Several conferences under the South African Water, Energy, and Food banner were related to this. It had some success in bringing together the private sector, the government and leading academics to discuss how the country was preparing for the risks and was in many ways not ready for them.
The water-energy-food nexus is just a rather grand name for an obvious fact, namely that government departments have spent years pretending not to understand that water, electricity and food production are joined at the hip. You need water to generate power. You need power to pump, clean and move water. And agriculture collapses without both. Yet South Africa has traditionally managed these systems in separate bureaucratic silos, each with its own minister, budget, consultants and excuses.
For a water-scarce country with a brittle grid and vulnerable yet incredibly resilient agriculture, the nexus is less an academic theory than a national risk register. Turton saw that early. The tragedy is that South Africa heard the warning, held the conferences and largely carried on as before.
Over the past year I’ve spoken to relevant people across the country about the water mess. Gift of the Givers described the drilling of a borehole near Port St Johns for a community that had been abandoned by local government for a decade and where children and cattle had been drinking from the same bog. Engineer Felix Reiners reminded me that South Africa has the world’s fourth-largest fleet of centre pivots for irrigation — those mechanical dinosaurs that stride across farmland. And Matthew Cheney of Hall Core Water is building utility-scale borehole systems for industry.
Civil society, engineers and business are finding answers.
But far and away the most interesting and important conversation I had was with water & sanitation director-general Sean Phillips, a paragon in the civil service. He seemed to have a handle on the water crisis, its root causes and, encouragingly, some seemingly good ideas for fixing it.
I can see his fingerprints all over South Africa’s latest water plan, which was published last week. It does something that is rare for an official document: it tells the truth.
Not all of it, mind you. Government plans seldom do. But enough to make the new National Water Action Plan a document worth taking seriously.
Its opening sentence dispenses with the usual bureaucratic chloroform: “South Africa’s water crisis has reached a breaking point.” It then gets more specific. Seventy-four percent of water services authorities were rated “poor” or “critical” in assessments relating to drinking water or wastewater; 46% of water supply systems recorded poor or bad microbiological compliance; 81% of municipal wastewater infrastructure is in poor or critical condition; and nonrevenue water levels average 47%.
That nearly half the water entering municipal systems is either leaking away, stolen, improperly metered or never billed for in a dry country (among the 30 driest in the world) is effectively sabotage by neglect.
The plan’s real virtue is that it finally abandons the comforting fiction that South Africa’s water crisis is mainly about dams, droughts and climate change. Those things do matter, but the immediate crisis in most cities and towns is much uglier and much closer to home: local government is failing to run water as a utility.
This is exactly the diagnosis offered by Phillips when I interviewed him recently.
“Water across the value chain is supposed to be funded from revenue from the sale of water,” he said. Not from income tax. Not from VAT. From water revenue.
That sounds obvious. In practice, it is anything but. Municipalities have routinely swept water income into general revenue and spent it elsewhere. Maintenance gets deferred. Meters stop working. Billing collapses. Pipes burst. Sewage plants fail. Revenue falls further. The spiral tightens and the taps run drier.
Next week I will share more on how the National Water Action Plan hopes to fix this and where that hope remains just that.