‘The question now is, is there the necessary technical acumen within those institutions to turn the ship around? Everything that I've seen suggests to me that we do not have that technical acumen,’ says water scientist, Professor Anthony Turton.
JEREMY MAGGS: In some quarters it’s now being called a full-blown crisis, as large parts of Johannesburg remain without water, anger is growing. The city’s mayor is nowhere to be seen and overnight, we hear that Rand Water is adding 100 million litres to the city system to help improve the Roodepoort reservoirs and water towers.
But to date, Johannesburg Water has noted some improvements in most parts of the systems. To aid the recovery process of our reservoirs and towers, our bulk supplier, Rand Water, is pumping an additional 100 megalitres, which is contributing to the improvements in our system. So we had to go back, as Johannesburg Water, and approach Rand Water for them to be able to pump an additional 100 megalitres of water in order for us to start to stabilise the system.
I want to bring into the conversation now, probably South Africa’s top water watcher, commentator, writer and analyst, the engineer, Professor Anthony Turton. Professor, thank you very much indeed. So my first question is, how can a city effectively not supply water to around 60% of its residents over five or six days? It begs belief.
ANTHONY TURTON: Well, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it’s always easy to say. I first pitched this idea of a failed state in South Africa, and to the best of my knowledge, in 2008 at a conference, an Africa Day conference at Unisa . At that point in time, I was seeing international data on water scarcity and water, what is known as hydraulic density of population, that was starting to put South Africa in the same category as the Middle East, north Africa area.
I would say that we have reached a point of systemic failure, and the empirical evidence of that systemic failure is the implementation of the policy of water shedding. So how do you, for example, produce whatever widget it is that you’re making? How do you, for example, produce motor cars or how do you produce any other product that requires maybe a steam boiler to run, or you’ve got to maybe boil food in the food processing industry or whatever. How do you maintain your cashflow under those circumstances because you can’t keep your factory going.
But the bottom line is that some years ago, it’s probably as many as 10 years ago, I started reporting on the first schools that were unable to operate because of water shutdowns. At that point in time, kids had to be sent home because there were no toilet facilities available for them. Absolutely nothing has come of that. There were reports in the media about that and it just became considered as a normal condition.
From what we know now, as failure happens, it accelerates faster and faster. It’s like when you go bankrupt it, it starts slowly, and then eventually it accelerates and then it comes fast. It’s exactly the same with state failure. The water sector is unfortunately a very critical part of that and also an empirically verifiable part of state failure.
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