Water, they warn us, will be the oil of the future; a commodity that will make new fortunes. But in SA we’re not waiting for the future. Here, it turns out, you don’t even need to have any actual water to get rich; you just need to have meetings about it.
According to figures provided by water minister Pemmy Majodina and reported in the Sunday Times, SA’s various water boards are making it rain as they get deluged with R50m a year, with some board members earning (or at least being paid) up to R100,000 per meeting.
The story was framed as something of a scandal, no doubt to the satisfaction of the MK party’s Visvin Reddy, who winkled the numbers out of the minister as part of his ongoing campaign to have her fired. One can understand the alarm: paying someone R100,000 to nod just often enough to look as if they’re keeping up while they secretly Google “Is rain made by God or is there a factory?” doesn’t feel like the bleeding edge of administrative best practice.
And that’s to say nothing of the absurdity of paying tens of millions to people to guarantee ongoing failure. At this point most of SA’s water boards look less like administrative bodies than one of those plastic steering wheels you give a toddler so it can pretend to be driving the car.
Of course, at the risk of angering exhausted taxpayers and Reddy, it should be pointed out that, at least by SA standards, this is a fairly small scandal. In a country that can blow more than R150m a week on unauthorised, irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure, paying people R50m for a whole year of warming a chair feels like a fairly good deal.
I mean, at least those meetings actually happened. Granted, they mostly focused on deciding the date and menu for the next meeting; and yes, most attendees were just there to make sure nobody tried to demoralise the collective by asking if anyone has checked how they do it in the Western Cape. But still, at least we’re getting if not a bang for our buck, at least a very small pop.
It’s also worth reminding readers that the circumstances of this latest exposé are tainted with a whiff of hypocrisy. Reddy might be right in his condemnation of SA’s water management, but as a member of Jacob Zuma’s MK party he is working for a man who led a party and a state defined by a refusal to do basic maintenance while entrenching a deep contempt for both taxpayers and anything resembling efficiency, all in the service of short-term personal enrichment. If SA’s water boards are collections of stuffed suits whose only demonstrable skill is gouging taxpayers, then Zuma is as much to blame as Majodina or Cyril Ramaphosa.
Still, blame is only useful if it leads to change, and small scandals can become immense if they are repeated thousands of times. For now, change seems unlikely. Like so many South Africans who live on top of knackered water infrastructure leaking millions of litres into the clay every day, this state sits on a vast, gnarled, rusted, hopelessly interlinked network of patronage and extraction, pumping money down into the dark where it leaks out of hundreds of bent or crooked conduits into the pockets of a select few.
It can’t all be dug up and thrown away: the chaos would overwhelm all of us. Then again, replacing a length at a time might get us there eventually, and there’s an election next year ...
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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