There isn’t water to cook rice for two people, but Cape Town is still open for business — in the literal sense. Joburgers still fly down for meetings, tourists still come for the mountain and it is still the nation’s second city.
I spent two nights in the Mother City this week. The 1,000-day drought is a natural disaster, but in just more than two months it will be a humanitarian one too.
Perhaps because of its isolation, the Cape can appear out of step with the rest of the country. The DA has never tired of saying how well it runs Cape Town. Not that the rest of SA was listening. We spent 2017 catatonically enraptured by the ANC’s attempt to eat us. Sure, every time we flew into Cape Town it looked worse, but upcountry we were trying to save the country, you know?
But now it is 2018 and it looks as though we’ve saved the country — except Cape Town, where the DA has no plan at all, unless blaming the ANC and one another constitutes a plan.
There are two months’ worth of water left. Cape Town is up a sandy creek and Premier Helen Zille has no paddle. It is now clear that the DA’s local and provincial governments are as incompetent as the ANC’s national one but twice as condescending. Under the DA’s watch, SA’s most famous city is no longer viable. The DA has broken the Cape and the ANC has allowed it to do so.
Cape Town is unfathomably dry. Gardens comprise sand, droop-dry trees and the memory of shrubs. Home and office floors are as sticky as those in dodgy cinemas. Toilets are unflushed, festering in ever darker shades of yellow. The Mother City is dirty, disconsolate and scared.
In Cape Town, they talk about water. A lot. Day Zero is estimated to be April 12. In two-and-a-half months, all the water will be gone, like the DA’s veneer of technocratic competence. What remains is Zille, Mmusi Maimane and Patricia de Lille passing the buck so comprehensively that Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini is growing despondent. But never mind. At least the national official opposition will take the Cape’s collapse very seriously after it has dealt with De Lille not being nice enough.
Having survived 2017, South Africans know that for every crisis, there are various complicit corporates.
The V&A Waterfront will keep pretending days are not dark and airlines will continue flying thousands of people into Cape Town until the airport’s jet-bridge operators have dehydrated to death.
It is not in SA’s interest to shut down business in Cape Town. But is it not in the interest of Cape Town’s residents? There is an increasingly indefensible cost to going to Cape Town.
On Monday afternoon, Mango Airlines disgorged me and 100 other people into the metro. I had showered in Johannesburg at lunchtime, which had to last until I returned on Wednesday night.
I also took 15l of water, because I hoped Mango would allow me to take it to the drought-stricken city.
"Your bag is too heavy," the check-in guy said. "It’s 25kg."
"Ja, I packed 10l of water to help our compatriots," I said. "Is it not our duty?"
The check-in guy agreed but said it was his supervisor’s call to make.
"You have to pay R50 extra per kilogram," the supervisor said. This charge would make me the owner of a R250 bottle of water, so I tried to wriggle out of it.
"But my bag will only be 15kg when I come back," I said.
No, she said.
I tried to invoke patriotism by saying Mango was a state-owned airline, but the supervisor didn’t budge. I gave the check-in guy the bottle of water worth R250. My suitcase weighed exactly 20kg. I succeeded in getting a 5l bottle of water onto the plane as hand luggage.
But even if Mango allowed us to take a drink to a drought, we are adding to Cape Town’s crisis. We use towels, sleep on sheets and brush our teeth.
And, of course, there is one bodily function for which flushing is still allowed. By the end of April, Capetonians will nostalgically recall the days when they flushed their faeces out of their homes.
This week, two Cape Town clients told me their plans to reduce their water footprint. They are sending staff on secondments to their Johannesburg offices. They are moving meetings upcountry. An illustrator asked which Johannesburg suburb most resembled Kloof Street.
Ethical companies are working with their clients and suppliers to eliminate Cape Town meetings. Instead of two people going down there, they are asking three people to come up here. They will be happy to come — showers are lovely.
The deeper Zille’s decline, the more she seems to channel the ghost of Margaret Thatcher — but without the former British leader’s warmth and empathy.
Back in 2012, when Zille’s enthusiasm for colonialism was still a private hobby, she called schoolchildren moving from the Eastern Cape "education refugees". By her own logic, she might be forced to seek refuge in SA once the provincial government’s water runs out.
It is time for business to realise that the government won’t save the Cape. Aircraft should be empty on the way down and packed on the way up. Cape Town citizens who are mobile enough need help to do their work from another city.
The Cape’s supply is done; to reduce demand, large groups of people need to leave the city for the sake of those who cannot. And when airlines do fly people there, they should facilitate the transport of water. Normally, when you nip down for a day on business, you do not take a suitcase. But what if we were still to claim our 20kg luggage allowance?
I think it would work. Take four 5l bottles of water. At the airport, have them wrapped in cling-film, check them into your flight and then abandon them, if you like.
You would have flown 20l of water into a disaster area, even though South African Airways does not want you to.
Table Mountain is still beautiful, even though Signal Hill looks like a sand dune dissected by a road. The ocean continues to sparkle cruelly, depositing wave after undrinkable wave across ever more sand. The Cape Town International Convention Centre is touting its support for February’s Mining Indaba, which will attract thousands of visitors to Cape Town hotels, restaurants and reservoirs.
In SA’s other cities, people have been cheering the fall of Jacob Zuma and the uncapturing of the state. But the party is over in Cape Town, and it should be shut down, for its own sake.
• Wiggett is founder and creative director of Fairly Famous, a progressive advertising agency
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