TOM EATON | Eat dirt, blow with the wind, fight fire with fire, just don’t mess with water

As the ANC and DA scramble to blame each other for the cholera outbreak in Tshwane, politicians and the public are getting a harsh reminder of something activists have been yelling for decades: whatever you mess up, make sure it’s not the water. 

I’m not surprised that our politicians have forgotten this warning, or that they never even heeded it in the first place.  

Their gift, after all, is to delay or defer difficult realities, and, when those realities can no longer be delayed or deferred, to deny them, and then to deny that they denied them.  

For three of the four classical, alchemical elements, that approach generally works.  

Earth is a prime example, with all the issues around land — access, ownership, usage — used by the ANC as a political stick and carrot for almost 30 years without anything resembling political progress or consensus.  

Air, likewise, is something blissfully free of deadlines and hard decisions. Airlines can be bailed out; airbases used as private airports. Poisoned or heated air can be explained away as an economic necessity (take a bow, Gwede Mantashe). Politicians can produce nothing but noxious wind and call it delivery; money can disappear into thin air as if it never existed; but consequences remain little more than a mirage shimmering on the horizon.  

As for fire, well, even that most destructive force seems to be contained and cooled by our politics. Two provinces were on fire in July 2021, but two years later there has been no meaningful investigation or explanation. Nobody gets fired, and while we get fired up from time to time, there’s usually more heat than light, and more smoke than flame.

We must roll up our sleeves, hold our nose and scoop the stinking, rotting political nappies out of our drinking water.  

But water is a very different matter. Certainly, the state can try to water down its callous incompetence, and the opposition can be accused of being a drip and a wet blanket, and party leaders will proclaim blue waves of red waves, and the wealthy can semigrate out of Gauteng and head for the coasts; but when the very real, non-metaphorical water in the pipes runs out or turns lethal, time is up. 

At this point some activists who have been watching that clock tick down towards midnight will look at this column and the many headlines howling about cholera and ask: where was this level of concern and coverage when we told you about this 10 years ago? It’s a fair question, and the sad reality is that in shell-shocked, exhausted South Africa we only get serious about our catastrophic lack of government when people start dying, and even then, we only tend to stay serious for a week or two until the story fades from the headlines. 

I must also admit that I might be an example of why we don’t take these warnings to heart: as much as we know the extent to which politicians deflect and deny reality, when your only experience of them is to watch them kick a can down a road for 30 years, you start believing, on some level that cans can be kicked indefinitely down roads, and that roads are endless.  

This, however, is fantasy. The hard and utterly inescapable fact is that we are at the very end of this road, and the can is shredded. According to statistics provided for The Conversation by Prof Anja du Plessis, a specialist in water resource management, nine out of every 10 water treatment plants in South Africa release raw or only partially treated sewage directly into water sources. And before supporters of the DA point triumphantly to well-run Cape Town, I would urge them to remember that even that city pumps 12 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of partially treated sewage directly into the Atlantic ocean every day, far too close, many activists insist, to the city’s western seaboard. Yes, the 26 wastewater plants that service Cape Town have mostly stayed out of the news, suggesting good management, but I suspect that disposing of those 12 swimming pools every day without an ocean would produce a very different set of challenges, perhaps producing some different results. 

According to Du Plessis, the current crisis has been caused by “a lack of maintenance of basic infrastructure at local government level”, a shortage of “capacity and suitable skills”, a failure to implement and enforce “existing legislation and policy”, and not enough accountability. 

She could be describing almost any dysfunctional aspect of public life in South Africa. Most of those, however, can be put off for another few years, albeit at a terrible cost to the economy and our future.  

But when the water goes, things turn very bad, very fast.  

So what can we do? I’ll leave the complex and slow recovery plan to experts like Prof Du Plessis, but in the short term, our first task is surely crystal clear: we must roll up our sleeves, hold our nose and scoop the stinking, rotting political nappies out of our drinking water.  

We must vote the ANC out of power and replace it with anyone — and I mean anyone — who can run a municipality for minutes without drowning in dysfunction and corruption.