With Day Zero — the day the Cape Metropolitan Area in South Africa runs out of water — looming, we see a crisis that could have been prevented taking hold and a warning for how the GOP targeting blue states for hardship could play out here in America.
The Cape Town water crisis does not come as a shock to the city. Every decade or so a big drought hits. What makes this one different is that the drought has lasted for three years and the cumulative effects are disastrous. Cape Town did not sit on its laurels ignoring the building situation. It did all it could to prepare...but then it ran into the brick wall of the national government.
One of the biggest debates is whether local government is handling the crisis effectively. Investigating this question exposes politics, not rainfall, at the heart of the problem.
The Western Cape is the only province in the country run by the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress runs the rest. This means that the relationship between national government and the Western Cape is complicated, as the water crisis shows.
To call the relationship “complicated” is being kind. There has long been an effort by the ANC to render Cape Town and the Western Cape Province “ungovernable”. Spearheaded by the former head of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, the effort has led to destruction and violence more than once.
Anyway, both the city of Cape Town and the Western Cape Province, have significant plans in place to deal with water management, including during droughts, for both the short and long term. In 2007, the national Department of Water and Sanitation warned that based on normal rainfall and usage trends, new water sources would be needed by 2015. The city immediately swung into motion with a management strategy that included replacing water meters throughout the city, pressure management, leak detection and free plumbing repairs for poor households.
The strategy was so effective that the city met its 2015-2016 water saving target three years early. This pushed the deadline back to 2019, based on normal rainfall and normal water use.
Then came the megadrought.
To understand the current crisis, it is important to know that the national government manages water allocation via dams throughout the country. And it designates the vast majority of that water to the country’s export-driven agriculture industry. When the city asked the national government to reallocate and conserve given the high likelihood of a coming shortage, it was denied.
There is evidence that the department’s failure went even further: that it allocated too much water to agriculture in the Western Cape. This pushed demand for water beyond the capacity of the supply system and consumed Cape Town’s safety buffer of 28 thousand megaliters.
The governments of Cape Town and the Province kept trying. In 2015, they asked the national government for R35 million (roughly US$3 million) to increase water supplies by drilling boreholes and recycling water. The request was rejected.
In 2016, the national government recognized five of 30 Western Cape municipalities as drought disaster areas...but not Cape Town, by far the most populated city in the region. Even with the five regions declared, however, the government failed to live up to financial commitments.
Again and again, the city and the province appealed for relief to prevent disaster. But again and again the requests were denied.
And now the region is stuck with the final, wholly preventable result. The consequences of which will be dire.
This is a story about politics, plain and simple. The politics of resentment and the politics of incompetence.
I can’t repeat enough that what is happening in Cape Town was preventable.
Beyond that, what is happening in Cape Town should serve as a warning for what could play out in the United States if the GOP gets its way.