Zukiswa Wanner
Active Citizenry Required for Water SecurityBy Zukiswa WannerHuman beings can survive up to 70 days without food but would die within six days at most, without water.
This is one of those seemingly ‘useless’ facts I have known since I was a precocious youth but lately, it seems possible that we may now start reading stories of people’s demise for lack of water. I write this, not in any desire to be a prophet of doom but as a witness to what seems like a deliberate attempt by our municipalities to make scarce a resource that we all need for survival.
A few days before the African Union Summit, I sat at a conference in Addis Ababa for the upcoming African Water and Sanitation Investment Summit in July in Cape Town. As I sat listening, the speaker stated what seemed like common knowledge to all but me in that room, that there are no African countries that are water-secure.
Until then, I had always assumed countries with tiny populations like Djibouti, the home of the new African Union Commission Chair Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, or even smaller ones like Cape Verde and Seychelles would be water secure.
I was wrong. As I left the meeting, I received news that in one of the municipalities, a woman died from a lack of water to wash down her medicine for a chronic illness. And it is not just in this municipality alone where water is a problem in South Africa. This seems to be countrywide despite great performance by some water boards like Rand Water according to Free State water expert, Professor Anthony Turton.
It’s worth questioning where the disconnect is from a water board supplying water efficiently to municipalities failing to deliver to residents. A statement from the Association of Water and Sanitation Institute of South Africa (AWSISA) on February 17 blames the power supply as well as on municipalities. In the former, irregular power supply disrupts Rand Water’s pump stations which means there is little the municipalities can do.
With the country plunged into Stage 6 load shedding again, one cannot help but worry how this may affect our water supply. Eskom notwithstanding, there are also some glaring failures from municipalities as the communique indicated. AWSISA berated municipalities for not investing in infrastructure repair despite receiving several grants to do so from the national government. This has not only resulted in needless water loss but also in municipalities supplying water irregularly to residents.
According to AWSISA, Gauteng municipalities alone lose an estimated 2.6 billion litres per day. These results are horrendous for all of us. Last week, for instance, the South Gauteng High Court had to close temporarily recently due to a lack of water. Someone had delayed justice because of this. We don’t know what other serious impacts this may have had on other citizens.
When the municipalities’ supply fails to meet demand, the rich will drill boreholes, sometimes with unintended consequences. None of us who had to finish our train journeys to Park Station from Rosebank by bus can forget how a privileged resident in Killarney has inconvenienced us. And what happens to the poor who cannot afford to drill boreholes and who make up the majority of the population in this country?
Where there is no income, there is the danger of using river water which may not always be clean and could result in the outbreak of waterborne diseases. For those poor who may be able to sacrifice some other necessities and be able to buy water, they have to resort to private water suppliers.
In this case, one cannot even have confidence about the origins and cleanliness of the water. I recall not long ago a Kenyan expose that some of the water suppliers in Nairobi were taking the water from Nairobi River.
Who is to say that our private water suppliers are not parking their trucks late at night by Jukskei and then proceeding to sell us this water whose cleanliness is questionable so that they can maximise their profits?
Where our dry taps cannot be helped because of erratic electricity supply disrupting the pumping of water, we can do little but be patient, but where this is caused by our municipalities, it’s long overdue that as citizens we hold them accountable.
Next year we have local government elections. We must start demanding that our councillors work for our votes now. When infrastructure goes unrepaired and citizens have to buy water from private suppliers, who benefits? Even if our councillors are not benefitting directly, why are they not holding each other accountable to ensure that not only is infrastructure repaired and replaced timeously but that outstanding bills by government departments and businesses are settled on time so that the municipalities can be able to pay the water boards what they are owing?
It can’t be that these same municipalities will cut us off for a month’s outstanding water bill yet are themselves, according to AWSISA still, owing more than R25 billion. Of this amount, R6.5 billion is owed to Rand Water which serves the economic pulse of the country. That’s a disproportionately large amount owed to one water board given that we have nine water boards in the country.
Despite its current reported successes as stated above, if Rand Water collapses due to non-payment of the bulk water it provides to municipalities then we risk getting worse water insecurity in Gauteng and in other parts of the country and more deaths like that of the woman I mentioned earlier.
Let’s not wait until two weeks before the elections to express our displeasure. Active citizenry must start now so that every vote each councillor gets is earned and where they fail, we find some other people, perhaps one of our neighbours who are equally affected by what we experience.
If those of us with the voices to do so fail to hold our municipalities accountable and this results in any more loss of lives, we would be as guilty of denying them a necessary resource as those who profit most from our lack of water.
* Zukiswa Wanner is an award-winning author, a Moi University African Cluster Centre Fellow, and among The Continent's '2024 Africans of the Year'.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.