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Water Crises in South Africa


The recently released Report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water  on 17/10/2024, offers us an opportunity to find our way back to the proud era of the first post-apartheid administration of effective socially just water and sanitation governance and management. We must value water as the lifeblood without which no life is possible.

The recent alarming reports of the failure of the Mogale Municipality to manage its water and sanitation systems, resulting in rivers turning into sewage channels, calls for urgent action at the highest level. President Ramaphosa as head of state is presiding over growing appointments of incompetent corrupt officials in government at all levels: national, provincial, and local authority. He must accept accountability for failing to effectively lead the renewal process he promised in his first, and now second term.


Ensuring that water as a common good is governed and managed effectively and efficiently, to meet the basic needs of all citizens and secure healthy ecosystems for present and future generations, is not possible without competent ethical accountable leadership.

South Africa needs to learn the lessons of effective competent governance in the immediate post-apartheid era.  Competent management of the environment, water and sanitation systems, under Prof Kader Asmal and his team of experts, enabled us to create innovative programs such as working for water, to remove water-guzzling alien plants that undermined indigenous biodiversity essential to green water storage to keep the hydrological system in balance. The participatory approach of Working for Water fostered ownership by communities everywhere it operated. It created jobs and livelihoods.


Nothing less than competent, skilled, and accountable municipal management can adequately address the catastrophic destruction of our water systems.  We are losing more than 40% of fresh water to leakages due to the failure to invest in maintenance and renewal of apartheid installed infrastructure to ensure basic services for all citizens to promote wellbeing for all. Our nation has enough competence and skills to address these failures, but the entrenched cadre deployment of party loyalists regardless of their lack of skills and experience.


Our failures are not only undermining the wellbeing of citizens of our democracy, but also putting at risk our neighbouring countries who share rivers and oceans with us. The central message of the Report of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water is that the Global Hydrological System needs to be governed as a global common good. The hydrological cycle connects all countries, all regions, all continents, and the entire globe. Water literally runs through all the SDGs. We cannot meet any of the SDGs, nor adequately deal with the disastrous climate change, without secure, safe, and socially just distribution of water.


The private sector needs to come to the party.  Water governance and management must be included as a key element of the work of the partnership between the Government/Private sector.  We need to value the whole hydrological cycle – blue and green water: Green water as an additional value from forests, wetlands and all natural ecosystems, are not currently being captured in our national accounting systems and economic measurements. Much of our business operations, our policies, and our decision-making about land, do not sufficiently value water, as a national asset and common good. It is iniquitous to continue with the current system of landowners assuming ownership over rivers passing through their land.

 

Water-related disclosure – green and blue – must be reinforced to assess both the financial and physical materiality of a destabilised hydrological cycle for corporates, and financiers. Disclosure of how corporate activity affects – and is vulnerable to – the hydrological cycle can inform actions aimed at increasing resilience of their operations and redirect financial flows to support the water, nature, and climate agendas. Water intensive industries such as agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, need to be accountable as good corporate citizens and make sure that they do not contribute to worsening the crises of water and sanitation which we are experiencing as a nation.

 

The private sector to the extent that we fail to manage and govern our water systems appropriately: blue water in our rivers and oceans, and green water stored in the plant kingdom and soil, we are failing in our duty at the national, continental, and global levels.

President Ramaphosa has the opportunity to lead us out of the current water and sanitation crises. A national programme to reimagine and reshape our governance and management of water and sanitation systems, would serve as a sustainable stimulus to our moribund economy.   Reconstruction and develop our human settlements with the aid of new technologies and partnerships between government, private sector and communities, would address the unfinished business of our transition to democracy. Parting ways with the colonial practice of throwing sewage into the ocean must stop and be replaced by technological solutions including bio digesters that generate gas for home energy use. And much more!

Mamphela Ramphele

Co-Founder of ReimagineSA and Commissioner of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water

29/10/2024

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