Only greed doesn’t run dry

File photo: Itumeleng English

File photo: Itumeleng English

Published Nov 23, 2015

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Kevin Ritchie laments the greed and selfishness that saw Kimberley’s taps run dry.

I caught a glimpse of the future last week - and it terrified me; Kimberley ran out of water. The diamond capital has always been dry; in its heyday, the gardens of the well-to-do consisted of fine gravel, beautifully raked, with the only patch of exquisitely manicured lawn outside the Kimberley Club.

With the advent of a pipeline from Riverton on the Vaal River all the way through to the city, the gravel lawns were consigned to museum houses, and lawns became the preserves of everyone.

It’s not the fact that Kimberley ran out of water that transfixed me, but rather the horror of watching from the safe distance of Joburg the equivalent of a car crash in slow motion.

The drama started ramping up the week before; the Sol Plaatje Municipality warned all and sundry of its intention to switch off the water for a weekend to do some much-needed infrastructure upgrades.

Nobody could have foreseen what would happen next, or could they?

The water was supposed to be cut on Friday night, but the municipality had to cut it on Thursday night after people started filling pools, JoJo tanks, soaking their lawns and washing their cars, seriously endangering the water levels in the reservoirs.

The water was turned on again on Friday morning and the process repeated itself, a mad rush to get the most out before the big dry. And then Sod’s law kicked in. When the engineers tried to fit one of the new valves, it didn’t, so running repairs had to be done on site, delaying the schedule.

Some people took to visiting long-lost relatives in old age homes or paying courtesy calls on patients in hospitals - they had emergency water supplies - to fill up their containers with free water, taxis besieged one of the emergency municipal water points to wash their taxis, and some other water points.

In one particularly egregious case, a Free State businessman sent his water tanker through to Kimberley to fill up with water and take it back to Bloemfontein - which is on water shedding - but was caught.

When the municipality eventually tried to restore the water supply, there was such a run on the reservoirs that the four dams that serve Kimberley were emptied.

The water supply then had to be cut to allow the reservoirs to be filled up to a sustainable level where the pumps could work to push water to higher-level areas, without people in the low-lying areas sucking the lines dry again.

What should have been a weekend disruption has spiralled out into a full-blown disaster that took an entire week to resolve.

It hasn’t all been awful. On Friday the DFA reported on the heroes of the crisis, people living on plots and farms outside the city, drawing water from their boreholes to fill tanks, which they took into town to offer their water for free to thirsty townspeople.

Those heroes haven’t been enough to offset the greed and selfishness of others in the city who have run their boreholes so much that the water table has dropped, rendering many boreholes dry.

I once read that the next war wouldn’t be about ideology, Paris, Beirut and Syria notwithstanding, or even oil (Gulf Wars I and II) – but over water. I laughed. I’m like that.

I scoffed when a guy I knew gave up a plum job as the Free State and Northern Cape manager of the then single-channel M-Net (way before the advent of DStv) to work for the as-yet-unheard of MTN to sell this terribly expensive bricklike thing with a standby battery life of 90 minutes.

It was called a cell phone and I watched some pundit on Good Morning, South Africa have the audacity to say that the gadget would change our world for ever, it would be so ubiquitous even gogos selling mielies on the street corner would use them for their business.

I’m not sniggering any more. That future is here, the next revelation has just hit us - and it cuts across class, colour and creed far more effectively than even 1994 and 2010 managed.

We can live with load shedding by Eskom, we can play Scrabble by candlelight and cook on a skottel - hell, that’s a lived reality for hundreds of thousands of South Africans as it is.

No one can live without water, though. And when the taps run dry, we start behaving like cornered rats, where the devil takes the hindmost and it’s literally the survival of the fittest.

The scariest thing is that it isn’t as if there’s no water; the Vaal is still flowing. Kimberley hasn’t lost the ability to purify water, as some municipalities have. This was a scheduled two-day shutdown, with a dollop of bad luck and a side order of unbelievable selfishness.

Can you even begin to imagine what will happen when a real water crisis hits? We’re going to have a civil war.

But here’s the news: the battleground is not just about fixing infrastructure, cutting waste and getting people to pay, it’s also about creating punitive laws to punish those who steal water. They need to be jailed – for a very long time.

* Kevin Ritchie is the Editor of the Star, and former Editor of the DFA

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