As stress over water rises, don’t expect a brave new world

I have seen the future, and it works," proclaimed a celebrated New York journalist after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919.

As Cape Town hurtles towards becoming the first major city whose taps run dry, we may also be the advance guard into a global future. Populations will continue to swell while resources dwindle.

In the developed world, where citizens have long come to assume that  running tap water is a right, social stresses will be particularly fraught.

It has become common cause that wars in this century may be over water. But what of internal tension in densely populated cities? In Cape Town these days the norm is blue skies with not a rain cloud in sight.

Lincoln Steffens, who thought he’d seen a workable future in the USSR, later disavowed that cheery sentiment. Today, as we face a parched crisis, the question is: will this emergency result in conflict or some sort of communal cohesion?

Both globally and locally resources are unlikely to alter dramatically, so change will have to come from our expectations and behaviour. After months of lacklustre messages Cape Town authorities recently went into overdrive. The result has been low-level panic, with loose talk of civil unrest or outbreaks of disease. My goddaughter, who has collected water at the Newlands spring for months, reports that long queues have led to scuffles and fraying tempers, necessitating the presence of security guards. Recriminations between provincial and national government continue, along with an ill-timed fracture in the leadership of the DA. The signs so far are not promising.

In the past I have experienced both water stress and water harmony. In 1973, within a month of arriving to live in Naples, there was an outbreak of cholera, blamed on contaminated water. Soon there were fatalities. Panic spread.

Then I fell ill: all the deadly symptoms. By the time the plague passed it had claimed 22 lives, mostly the very young or very old. But a couple of years later I lived for a few months in a small hilltop village in Sicily where the only way to get water was to queue at the village pump.

This ritual was regulated by unwritten rules, with the elderly allowed through first. It was also a place of laughter, exchange of information and gossip.

Many studies have shown that replacing such an archaic system leads to convenience but can also result in increased isolation and social fragmentation. Once gone, it is a romantic illusion to imagine such networks can be revived. Lining up in long queues for your allotted ration of water is unlikely to lead to the kind of one-day euphoria seen in the queues for our first democratic election in 1994.

It is notoriously difficult to change behaviour. In 2016, for example, the major British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s launched a massive £10m "Waste Less, Save More" campaign. Quoting British government statistics that the average UK family wastes £700 of food a year, the supermarket aimed to encourage households to cut this by 50%. After a one-year trial costing £1m, Sainsbury’s dramatically scaled back its campaign, admitting that inspiring behavioural change was far more difficult than expected.

How different people and diverse communities react to the pain of Day Zero, when taps are turned off, will make an instructive study for future crises. So far the city’s efforts at communicating the severity of this emergency have not led to the necessary cut in water consumption. Too many still use far too much. Some wealthy homes pump out borehole water as though there are no consequences to depleting the water table. Along the green belt in the southern suburbs I see homes the size of hotels drenching vast, sumptuously green lawns with torrential downpours. Pass by 20 minutes later and there’s still a garden monsoon.

Stress tends to expose social fractures. On drive-time talk radio shows, many — perhaps most – privileged people come up with positive ideas. Quite a number complain, clearly feeling that others should take the strain. There are also those whose attitude is unapologetic about their excess usage, claiming "I pay a lot for my privilege" — indicating that quite a few white South Africans still don’t accept that historically others have paid for their profligate privileges.

The future: will it work? Maybe, but when taps run dry don’t expect to see reflected through those last drops the afterglow of a rainbow nation.

• Rostron is a journalist and author.