The one certainty the poor unwashed Capetonians must expect about the city’s water crisis is that whatever new scheme the city government hatches next, it will cost them money and it won’t work.
The latest manipulation to emerge from drought central is the announcement that the city has cancelled Day Zero 2019, though not necessarily Day Zero 2020, or beyond. But, well, that’s nice, and just in time too for the outbreak of a new range of water charges.
The most recent of these is a thing called a water-delivery charge. This levy, according to a communiqué by Cape Town official Gisele Kaiser, is intended to compensate the city for its loss of revenue caused by lower consumption necessitated by the drought in the Western Cape.
It is true that the city lost revenue. Even ratings agency Moody’s spotted that and issued a warning in January that the water-supply crisis was "credit negative". It was careful though to modify the understanding of the crisis to mean it is one caused by an inadequate supply. It is not a water crisis, or a drought crisis.
The City of Cape Town is not that careful in its missives. It mostly blames the crisis on "insufficient rainfall". At other times it has blamed the national government for failing to improve infrastructure to cope with a (predictable and quantifiable) increase in demand related to migration. It has not taken responsibility for its complicit negligence in not holding the national government accountable for a foreseeable crisis.
The city’s enduring response has been to manage demand, plus plugging leaks. The way it manages demand is through fear-mongering (the Day Zero), tariffs and choking flow. In February, the city introduced another measure ("the more you use, the more you pay"), which means water users pay at progressively higher rates as their consumption rises.
This would seem reasonable if the triple tier which governs Capetonians did its bit to increase supply, as it is obliged to do under the Constitution. But they are not, scrapping plans to hire a desalination barge, for instance, presumably because the Cape’s winter rains arrived just in time and in volumes.
It would’ve seemed reasonable too if water had become a commodity now that scarcity is the norm. But it is not. Water is not sold. What is sold is the delivery service, and for that there is a new fixed tariff to 95% of households, regardless of the pressure it delivers. It means it is unreasonable to charge Capetonians twice for what amounts to the same thing, or for less if your flow is choked.
And water is not scarce. What is scarce is adequate service delivery, which is a breach of the social compact and the Constitution.
Cape Town’s various governments knew as long as 20 years ago that the city was heading for a crisis. When they failed to act then, they were derelict in their duty. In October 2016 when councillor Erika Botha-Rossouw asked mayor Patricia de Lille whether the city was heading for a water crisis, De Lille sent her to planet Zork, because there "(is) no water crisis".
Most unreasonable though is the faux economics of demand management. In the first instance, it is predicated on the erroneous assertion of water scarcity, the consequence of which is that the true price of water delivery cannot be discovered but is manipulated to compensate for the inadequacies in the city’s financial management. In justification of the delivery charge, mayoral committee member Xanthea Limberg admits that the city has realised the tariff structure has not been resilient since the drought started.
Resilient? In a single statement Limberg blames the crisis on the weather and introduces the idea that delivery tariffs will fluctuate (read: increase) in accordance with the Cape’s erratic rainfall patterns. This mind-set means Cape Town will never rid itself of Day Zero scenario. Moody’s won’t like it.
The government in all its manifestations fails to understand that without an abundance of water delivered to where it is needed, it cannot build infrastructure or expect the economy to grow. Capetonians and South Africans charged the government and the city to deliver. Now they must do as they’re told.
• Blom is a flyfisher who likes to write.
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