Makhanda is heading towards a drought-fuelled water crisis. One gets the sense that our local political leaders have their heads in the sand about the matter.
Currently, at least one major dam is sitting at 15% capacity.
Pictures of the dam are tragic, so hot has it been for the past five years that where water used to be, is now a carpet of wild grass on the banks of the dam.
Like many people, I suspect that this situation is largely caused by climate change.
I also suspect that our government officials have no idea what climate change really is in the scientific sense and how it is already impacting on the world.
Compounding this situation is the fact that our local government is struggling to deal with just the basics, such as sewerage systems.
It is therefore a stretch to believe that they will have any clue as to how to manage the unknown climate variables. As I write this, the municipality has not even started a serious water-saving campaign, nor has it promulgated water restrictions.
Now on one hand, municipalities are hamstrung because they are preoccupied with the politics of internal squabbles that lead to maladministration.
Dysfunctional municipalities lose skilled professionals and eventually infrastructure cannot be maintained.
By the time sewage is pouring out into people’s gardens and water shortages become normal life, municipalities have long lost their technical staff, who refuse to be abused and tainted by the machinations of politicised officials.
But on the other hand, there is also a deeper, perhaps imperceptible problem within the machinery of the post-apartheid South African state itself.
That problem is the problem of what I call “the magical belief in the white standard of life”. The magical thinking refers to the unstated assumption that the luxuries and indulgences of what was once white-only middle class life are the most desirable measure of developmental success for South Africa.
We live with policy that has normalised the excessive amount of water that is used in middle-class households: the ability to turn on taps, take long hot showers and have green lawns year round – and, of course, have a sparkling blue swimming pool.
Our own water policy has in-built mechanisms in which the water use of the rich is used to cross-subsidise the poor.
While this may seem effective in delivering water to the poor and helping to finance the water delivery systems, one wonders if those who created this policy ever asked themselves what would happen if water shortages became a permanent reality in South Africa and there is no more water “to buy”.
After all, SA has a long history of droughts and 40% of the country can be considered arid or semi-arid.
The fact that we have to import water from Lesotho to deal with the scale of demand in places like Johannesburg tells us that we are not living within our ecological means.
With the ups and downs of climate change, who knows what ecological problems are still coming to impact on predictable water provision?
It is undoubtedly one of the major achievements of the ANC to design cross-subsidy water financing systems that bring water to millions of black people who had previously been denied this basic necessity.
However, in reality, the rich will always pay whatever necessary tariff they have to in order to use quantities of water that meet their standard of life.
What should have also happened after 1994 was that we should have redesigned the wasteful systems that allowed the Van Tonders and Smiths to have swimming pools.
Endlessly flowing water was an irrational privilege of white life in SA under apartheid.
Sustainability requires that we look at the overall design of the system and admit that having 100% full dams may become an increasingly rare ecological event...