Ten years ago global climate change models predicted droughts in south-western Africa. This was marginally observed over some years, but has struck with a vengeance more recently.
Cape Town’s water supply was always vulnerable. It relied on a spread of shallow dams that have no major river inputs, but rely mainly on local mountain run-off during winter rains. As predicted, these are now failing.
National water authorities should have started installing alternative water infrastructure systems to augment the city’s supply, but did nothing. Two decades ago they had a team of experts that could have designed and constructed such a system. Fifteen years ago they were all but gone.
More than 20 years ago, on an excursion to the Cape Flats, we were told the most pressing issue causing people to trek to the city from the Eastern Cape was a failing water supply back home.
Neither was the city’s infrastructure able to cope with huge migrant numbers to the flats, bringing impoverishment and a host of other concerns. It is also faced with handling a super-rich population and their requirements.
The stress on the city’s administration results in management tensions. Ultimately, it is one of the plethora of government failures offloaded on to poorly prepared and funded local authorities.
We all have to share the country’s unequally distributed resources. We can switch our electricity around the geography, but not water. Botswana (population 2.3 million) has a national 360km north-south water pipeline connecting sources with consumers, to be extended another 560km. We don’t.
A capital project that our renewed ANC government needs to undertake immediately is a pipeline from, say, the outlet of the Lesotho Highlands water supply via the Eastern to the Western Cape. Gauteng dams are more than 70% full and rising.
This relative bounty must be shared, even if it means less water for our gardens and for showers. The narrowing water gap for Cape Town can only be bridged with desalination, sewage recycling, borehole drilling and draconian conservation measures involving inevitable economic losses.
Fortunately, we have the private sector skills, the construction capacity and as yet untapped internal investment capital to complete this first stage of a national grid in three years. With the political will motivated by an unfolding humanitarian disaster, we should be able to manage it.
Balt Verhagen
Bramley