SONGEZO ZIBI | Apartheid 'not over' while water crisis persists

This week we commemorate Human Rights Day on the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre. On March 21 1960, 69 residents of the Vaal Triangle township were killed in cold blood during a passbook protest. Today, their grandchildren wade through raw sewage daily in what the Human Rights Commission has found to be “an obvious violation of their rights to dignity”.

According to the government’s latest annual Green Drop Report, 64% of South Africa’s wastewater treatment works are at “high or critical risk” of discharging raw sewage into our rivers. The report confirms that a dangerously unacceptable volume of untreated sewage is returned into our water system every day.

The dysfunctional council of Emfuleni, which includes Sharpeville, is in particularly bad shape. At least one of its treatment plants has been designated “high risk”. Emfuleni carries a particular burden: its sewage directly enters the river that runs alongside it, the Vaal, which provides nearly 19-million South Africans with their water.

Sixty-four years ago, Sharpeville set us on the path to armed struggle and, ultimately, democracy. The price it paid for this was devastatingly high. Today, the sewage of its residents is poisoning our waters, through absolutely no fault of their own. Eighty kilometres to the north, in the country’s economic heartland of Johannesburg, millions of people were without water for nearly two weeks because of an undetected broken valve. And just north of that, at least 23 people died in an outbreak of cholera due to a failure in Tshwane’s sewage system.

We thought cholera was “over” just as we thought apartheid was “over”. But we are in the throes of a water crisis in South Africa that is at least as severe as our energy crisis, and potentially more fatal. We can live without electricity, but we cannot live — let alone grow — without water. Certainly, climate change and drought threaten us, but the current crisis is entirely the fault of humans.

And if the water crisis persists, then apartheid is not “over” either. As with electricity, those who can afford it will just privatise, and buy their clean water. But most South Africans will be left drinking contaminated water — or will have none at all.

In the face of this, it is all too easy to despair. Or to resort to our magnificent resilience as South Africans, and to add “dirty water” or “no water” to the pile of obstacles we have to overcome. But we have been doing this for too long already. There are solutions to our water crisis, and it’s time to implement them.

The government is to be commended for the annual Green Drop Reports. At least we know how bad things are. But what is being done about it? Derelict municipalities and officials need to be held accountable, and where serious problems have been identified — as in Emfuleni — partnerships with the private sector must be fast-tracked. We can no longer afford ideological purity in the face of this crisis. We need to activate a national policy of solidarity, and to find ways of bringing the private sector in to help solve this, and other, life-threatening problems. There are already such partnerships in eThekwini and Cape Town, where treatment plans sell water to nearby industries. These need to be studied and replicated.

Alongside this, we need a national effort to restore technical capacity to our municipal and water authorities. This begins at the top. Currently, there is not a single engineer with the requisite technical skills sitting on Rand Water’s board. At the operational level, as in the energy sector, cadre deployment has trumped technical skill. Cadre deployment disempowers us all, not least the cadres themselves. In its place, there needs to be solid mentorship programmes that are based on mutual respect and solidarity, and that hold technical excellence and delivery as their lodestar.

We also need to move with the times. If a digital platform had been in place in Johannesburg, that faulty valve would have been detected long before it had failed. South Africa is well-positioned to begin digitising its operational water systems, as much of the world already does.

From my own upbringing in Zwelitsha, a village in Mqanduli in the Eastern Cape, I know about water scarcity, and the way it makes life difficult. In these times of rising costs, and rising hunger, how can we even grow our own food if we can’t irrigate our land? Even today, 30 years after democracy, we only have communal taps with pressure so low that there is often no water in them. This despite the presence of a nearby aquifer. Even today, like almost all of the former Transkei, we have no reticulated sewage system. Most of us use long-drops and have to pay for our own septic tanks.

For too long, my fellow villagers have accepted this as “the way things are”. Just as homeowners of Blairgowrie accept that they have to spend their hard-earned money on bottled water even as they pay municipal rates. Or as the children of Sharpeville accept that learning how to jump over raw sewage is just one of life’s lessons.

We are frogs. We are boiling to death in the dirty water of ANC rule. It’s time to jump out.

Zibi is leader and founder of Rise Mzansi