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JEREMY MAGGS: In some quarters it’s now being called a full-blown crisis, as large parts of Johannesburg remain without water, anger is growing. The city’s mayor is nowhere to be seen and overnight, we hear that Rand Water is adding 100 million litres to the city system to help improve the Roodepoort reservoirs and water towers.
But Johannesburg Water says it is still going to take days to fully recover. I want to start our coverage with an extract from a briefing given a short time ago by Floyd Brink, he is the City of Johannesburg’s manager.
FLOYD BRINK: The water supply systems in Johannesburg, which were affected by City Power outages at our Rand Water Eikenhof pump station, are recovering very well. This after two separate outages at the substations, which took place on March 3, as well as on March 4, this week. So the complete recovery will take a few days. As and when we present and hear the technical side of it, you’ll start to understand exactly why I’m saying why it took a few days.
So the Johannesburg Water technical teams are constantly monitoring the progress, and I can indicate to the media (we’ve just come from) one of the Helderkruin reservoirs now, where we also went to go and specifically look at the Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition) system in order for us to see the monitoring of this particular water pressure in those areas. So in this case, the systems that were affected were Soweto, Randburg, Roodepoort, Johannesburg South and Central.
But to date, Johannesburg Water has noted some improvements in most parts of the systems. To aid the recovery process of our reservoirs and towers, our bulk supplier, Rand Water, is pumping an additional 100 megalitres, which is contributing to the improvements in our system. So we had to go back, as Johannesburg Water, and approach Rand Water for them to be able to pump an additional 100 megalitres of water in order for us to start to stabilise the system. This we are doing because all our systems are well interconnected, and it is also flexible for it then to augment and support one another in the recovery processes of all the systems.
JEREMY MAGGS: Now let’s hear from Jack Sekwaila, who is the MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services. He was speaking at that same briefing.
JACK SEKWAILA: We’re working around the clock to ensure that all systems should (recover) in a couple of days, probably over the weekend we should be stable across the city. We must indicate that we were at various reservoirs before we came here, where we could then do our own observation in terms of the levels of reservoirs, how they’re doing. We could indicate that we’re doing very well.
JEREMY MAGGS: Well, a bullish tone from the city, but I guess that is to be expected. On Thursday night, Johannesburg Water said there were some improvements in most systems, but it would intervene overnight with reservoirs and towers in the western parts of the city, which are still struggling. Try telling that to tens of thousands of angry residents.
I want to bring into the conversation now, probably South Africa’s top water watcher, commentator, writer and analyst, the engineer, Professor Anthony Turton. Professor, thank you very much indeed. So my first question is, how can a city effectively not supply water to around 60% of its residents over five or six days? It begs belief.
ANTHONY TURTON: Ja, the answer to that is simple. The institutions that need to make decisions to keep the services going matter, and those institutions evolve over time, and they’re extremely sophisticated places. For the last 30 years, we’ve had constant fiddling with institutions, constant transformation and changes, and more importantly, the staffing of those institutions by people who very often lack the technical competence.
So we are seeing institutional failure, and because of institutional failure, we are unable to convert inputs into outputs, which is a very simple way of understanding it.
The input is something is going wrong. The output is let’s fix what’s going wrong, and because we can’t convert an input into an output, a major city like Johannesburg is now increasingly just starting to become like eThekwini, Durban, which is the first metro to have failed.
Read: Water is being sold illegally in eThekwini
JEREMY MAGGS: So it was inevitable. We should have seen this coming.
ANTHONY TURTON: Well, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it’s always easy to say. I first pitched this idea of a failed state in South Africa, and to the best of my knowledge, in 2008 at a conference, an Africa Day conference at Unisa (University of South Africa). At that point in time, I was seeing international data on water scarcity and water, what is known as hydraulic density of population, that was starting to put South Africa in the same category as the Middle East, north Africa area.
I then posed the questionnaire at that conference, could South Africa become a failed state, thinking I might get shot down by the audience, but I wasn’t at all.
That was really the genesis of my interest in South Africa potentially becoming a failed state and how the mechanism and dynamics of state failure actually function.
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JEREMY MAGGS: Professor Turton, you talk about us fixing the water situation here in Johannesburg on the move, it seems to be a cut and paste job. How close are we, if there is such a thing at all, to full system collapse?
ANTHONY TURTON: I would argue that we have already reached a point of system failure, not necessarily system collapse. Words matter and definitions matter…
I would say that we have reached a point of systemic failure, and the empirical evidence of that systemic failure is the implementation of the policy of water shedding.
If we didn’t have to water shed, then we could still say that the system was functional, but by virtue of the fact that the system is unable to deliver the volume and the pressure and the quality of water that’s required, then of course we now require this policy of water shifting. Once you start implementing water shifting, you’ve effectively said that the system has failed, and you’re trying to now at least deliver some rudimentary service at least some of the time.
But there are a whole lot of complex things that kick in once you start doing that. One of them is that you introduce air into the system. Once you have air in a system that is designed to be fully pressurised all the time, you simply start literally breaking the system up from inside because you introduce water hammer as the system gets repressurised.
So your system fails at an accelerating rate once you’ve got water hammer in the system. This is a well understood phenomena in the engineering circles and this is what you’re now starting to see happening across areas, wherever you’ve got water shedding that’s being implemented.
JEREMY MAGGS: Professor Turton, this then is the new normal, is it?
ANTHONY TURTON: Well, it’s the new normal, but of course it hasn’t played itself out fully yet, because the next implication will be what about factories that require a stable supply of water in order to produce goods. So you must remember that the economy still has to function, and most people think of water only as the water that they drink. But that’s not true because the largest volume of water in any economy is that which produces food. In the case of South Africa, 60% of our water goes to food production, but it’s only about maybe 2% of the water that goes to drinking, but the rest of that water goes to the economy.
So how do you, for example, produce whatever widget it is that you’re making? How do you, for example, produce motor cars or how do you produce any other product that requires maybe a steam boiler to run, or you’ve got to maybe boil food in the food processing industry or whatever. How do you maintain your cashflow under those circumstances because you can’t keep your factory going.
Then, of course, the labour laws then kick in, you can’t simply lay people off because there’s no water now. So there are all sorts of other complications that start kicking in on a commercial side. This is what I’ve been working with, with some commercial clients over the last two years to try and prepare them for this moment, so that when this thing hits now, they’ve got some kind of contingency plan that can keep the businesses going.
JEREMY MAGGS: Professor Turton, that’s the economic dynamic. But let’s make no mistake, this is also life-threatening as well. There are reports of hospitals that are running out of water. The Department of Water and Sanitation has said that municipalities have a constitutional mandate to ensure their residents have water. It’s also become a human rights issue.
ANTHONY TURTON: Yes, it’s all of those issues, that’s why water is always such an enormously complex thing. International research by highly credible people shows that water always magnifies or amplifies underlying tensions in any society. So in South Africa we’ve got all sorts of tensions, tensions of inequality, the distribution of wealth, all that kind of stuff. That’s all being amplified now.
But the bottom line is that some years ago, it’s probably as many as 10 years ago, I started reporting on the first schools that were unable to operate because of water shutdowns. At that point in time, kids had to be sent home because there were no toilet facilities available for them. Absolutely nothing has come of that. There were reports in the media about that and it just became considered as a normal condition.
So now because of that inability to convert that input to the output that I mentioned earlier on, in other words, the institutions of management, because they were unable to interpret that information and saying, we’ve got to do something about this because this is going to accelerate, it’s not going to just be a school, it’s going to become a hospital, then it’s going to become a factory, then it’s going to become a suburb, and then it’s going to become a city. So these things escalate upwards, and our inability to take this matter seriously and to regard people like myself as people crying wolf out in the wilderness, all of that is now coming home to roost. The reality is that our water systems are failing.
Durban has become the first metro to have failed, is in a state of failure, we are now fast seeing the three metros in the Gauteng area in different phases of that same trajectory. They haven’t yet failed, but they’re showing signs of it.
So the question now is, is there the necessary technical acumen within those institutions to turn the ship around? Everything that I’ve seen suggests to me that we do not have that technical acumen. So therefore, I’m afraid the projection into the future is it’s going to become a lot more unstable in the very near future.
From what we know now, as failure happens, it accelerates faster and faster. It’s like when you go bankrupt it, it starts slowly, and then eventually it accelerates and then it comes fast. It’s exactly the same with state failure. The water sector is unfortunately a very critical part of that and also an empirically verifiable part of state failure.
JEREMY MAGGS: In conclusion, Professor Turton, right this very moment, what should Rand Water and Johannesburg Water be doing if they are not already doing it?
ANTHONY TURTON: Well, Rand Water is a world class institution. I’m going to just give you some numbers now. There’s a famous saying that the level of ingenuity needed to solve a problem exceeds the level of ingenuity that created the problem in the first place. So if we just reduce this to some very basic numbers, let’s just say for example that there were maybe 20 000 engineers over the last century who have brought water to the city of Johannesburg or to the whole Gauteng region.
So let’s just for argument’s sake say there were 20 000 engineers that did that. Now the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve now created an environment where 20 million people live. So 20 000 engineers have created the enabling environment for 20 million people to thrive. But all of those people are producing waste that goes downstream into their very same drinking water. So now that’s our problem. So we now have to solve that problem.
If we apply the law that I’ve just suggested now, which comes from Albert Einstein, we’ve got to have more than 20 000 people to solve the problem. If you look at the Rand Water team, at best they can mobilise 20 people. So we’ve got 20 people now who have to mobilise the ingenuity in excess of the 20 000 who created water systems in order to benefit the 20 million. So that’s a very powerful story to tell, I think, and I think that’s the narrative that I’m using at the moment now to explain the dilemma that we have.
JEREMY MAGGS: It certainly is a dilemma. Professor Anthony Turton, thank you very much indeed for that assessment. I appreciate it. Before I leave this story, I do want to share some other numbers. Rand Water is proposing a basic tariff increase now of 4.9% to municipalities. What does it mean you ask, well, the increase will take the charge from R12.68/kilolitre to around R13.43/kilolitre.
That would include value added tax (Vat). That’s due to take effect on July 1, the start of the municipal financial year. This number gives one no optimism at all. The amount of water lost by municipalities that Rand Water supplied has gone from 22% in 2005 to 45% in 2022. That data from the NGO WaterCAN.
