‘Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and you could say the same for Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Not content with mere load shedding, SA’s main cities now have to contend with water shedding, which of course means the same thing — no, nothing is put into a shed; it means shortages and cuts. For some, this is yet another inconvenience; for others, it is critical to life. At least two hospitals have recently been without water. Parts of Johannesburg are also sporadically without water and Stage 2 water restrictions have been imposed indefinitely.
It just shows how water provision has been a political issue for centuries, as it is in Johannesburg today. But like many questions about SA’s ongoing infrastructure disasters, what people partly want to know is who is at fault. Personally, I know exactly who that is, and that would be the person blaming other people.
So, the first option would be that there is a supply problem from the dams, but this is absolutely not the case. The Vaal Dam is currently at 90% capacity, Katse at 82% and Mohale at 89%. Mosai didn’t directly attribute any water shortage to climate change, but he certainly raised the issue. While climate change is certainly a concern in general, the dam levels demonstrate it cannot be held responsible for issues of provision right now.
Fixing these ruptures is the responsibility of the Johannesburg City Council, so now we can potentially blame the DA. But here is the strange thing: it is not necessarily the current DA administration we should hold to account, but the previous one under Herman Mashaba. Mashaba’s problem was that he ran the council in a coalition with the EFF, which required him to oust members of the Johannesburg Water Board and management to make room for some of his coalition’s stooges.
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