NEELS BLOM: More than hope needed to alleviate Cape water crisis

Hope, certain evangelists have been known to say, is what keeps humanity going, in dire times especially.

And when, you may ask, throughout the ages of the Anthropocene, have the times of humanity not been dire?

The evangelists may have a point, or at least a good business model. In the trenches there are no atheists, they say. There, desperate men buy hope with the currency of faith. There, before the rationality of despair, humanity grasps at irrational straws: one more minute, please, just one more breath, a last glimpse of the light.

Flyfishers know this. As the light fades after a day’s futile fishing, he makes one more cast fully knowing his presentation is wrong, and that his favourite fly (Oscar Wilde) is antimemetic, that his bond is in arrears, his toenails in-growing, yet he hopes, and he fishes on. But in the end, he finds the sparkling trout stream is naught but dust.

The peddlers of hope say something like this: a human being can live for weeks without food and for days without water and for minutes without air, but without hope, no one lives for longer than a moment. How much, then, in the currency of faith, do South Africans have to pay to acquire hope?

A lot, it seems. In the hierarchy of hope, the country is at the water phase. In five months (sooner, say some hydrologists), Cape citizens will queue with buckets for water at tankers manned by armed guards.

For some, for the poor, for the people who can pay with nothing else but faith, mere days will separate them from despair, yet they live in hope. The hope is that someone will do something, the government perhaps?

But rationally, that is false hope. The faithful have bought a lemon. They hope there is time still to deploy desalination barges in Table Bay and to drill holes into Table Mountain’s sandstone aquifer.

They hope waste-water recycling will buy them time until it rains again next winter. They hope irrationally — against the soulless arithmetic of hydraulic density of population — that it will rain enough.

They have faith in spades, of which the rest of the country will have to borrow (at an interest rate measured in the loss of GDP to the national economy) so that when all SA’s streams run to dust, the nation does not despair. But that, too, would be false hope. The government, that someone in whom they invest their faith, has done nothing useful to help its citizens in the Western Cape.

Suné Payne reports in Groundup’s latest newsletter that the Western Cape needs another R541m to deal with the immediate water crisis, yet the National Disaster Management Centre has refused requests for help — even as the emergency agency has underspent its budget by R300m. Certain conditions must be met before funds can be released, says Mmaphaka Tau, head of the agency, and it will take up to three months before it can be done.

The Cape’s water crisis is a national emergency.

What conditions are those? A collapsed economy? Dead people? How many? One, or eleventy plus one? What will the number be in five months when disease begins to take its toll and emergency services have run out of water? How many counts of homicide will the state and its agencies face when this foreseeable and preventable calamity is prosecuted?

It is incomprehensible that any constitutionally humanist state does not comprehend the consequences of its inaction. By denying relief to the Cape, the state has taken its citizens’ faith, but gave no hope in return. Even in the mind of one as obtuse and captured as Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Des van Rooyen (yes, he is in charge of disasters), a grain of compassion must remain, if not a sense of duty.

The Cape’s water crisis is a national emergency. If there is to be hope, Parliament must declare a national state of emergency, followed by the immediate release of funds and the mobilisation of the many available hydrologists, engineers and able-bodied workers who can swing a spade to rush to the aid of the people of the Cape.

For the Cape, Day Zero is coming. Their burden is ours.

• Blom is a fly fisherman who likes to write.