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29 March 2021 | Story Prof Anthony Turton | Photo Supplied
Prof Anthony Turton, Affiliated Professor in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State (UFS), writes that World Water Week provides an opportunity to rethink where we are as a nation.
National Water Week provides an opportunity to rethink where we are as a nation. It provides an opportunity to re-evaluate our journey from the past as a country with a fundamentally water-constrained but highly skewed economy, to a future in which inclusive growth can be achieved as a form of restorative justice. In my professional opinion, it is this journey towards restorative justice that lies at the heart of the way we ought to be thinking about our water management. 

Let me build the argument by describing key elements of this journey to restorative justice. Facts are our friends, so let me identify the key items that shape our journey. The most fundamental of all facts is that South Africa is one of the 30 driest countries on the planet. We often hear this from the media, but what does it mean, and what (if anything) can we do about it? The simple reality is that drought is normal in our part of the world. This simple fact, first written about in 1875 by JC Brown in a book with the grand title of Hydrology of South Africa; or Details of the Former Hydrographic Conditions of the Cape of Good Hope, and of Causes of its Present Aridity, with Suggestions of Appropriate Remedies for this Aridity, defined the simple truth that we live in a water-constrained area. This book became the first coherent body of knowledge about the constraints to economic development in our country. In engineering terms, once you know the problem, the next step is to find the solution; so, two years later, the same JC Brown published his sequel titled Water Supply of South Africa and the Facilitation for the Storage of It.  The core logic in these two books was simple. Because South Africa is arid, all economic development is constrained, so to achieve a desired level of future prosperity, we need to build dams to store water. The dam-building era was born. Stated simply, if you define the problem as a nail (water shortage), then the solution is to use a hammer (dam). 

A young professional by the name of Thomas Bain – a road engineer – was so deeply impressed by Brown’s work, that he began thinking about dam building in the arid areas where he was building roads. Road engineers draw maps and understand elevation and topography, so within a decade of Brown’s seminal work, Bain published his book Water-finding, Dam-making, River Utilization, Irrigation in 1886. The difference between Brown and Bain was startling because it created a radical shift in our thinking about water. Whereas Brown recorded local water scarcity as a limitation on local development, Bain said that localised scarcity could be resolved by capturing water from a different river basin and diverting it from where it is relatively abundant, to where it is relatively scarce. His mapping skills demonstrated that water could be diverted from the Orange River, across the escarpment, into the Fish and Sundays Rivers in the vicinity of what was then known as Port Elizabeth. Bain’s work became the intellectual foundation for the future economic prosperity of the country a century later when the Commission of Enquiry into Water Matters officially launched the South African hydraulic mission. In less than half a century, every major river had been connected to every other river in South Africa, driving economic diversification as the economy transitioned from an agricultural base to a mining, and subsequently to an industrial base. In all cases, this diversification was based on inter-basin transfers of water, to the extent that today our national economic well-being is totally dependent on this practice. 

What is the restorative justice?

But what of restorative justice? Have the fruits of democracy been translated into growing prosperity for the historically disadvantaged members of society? Have enough jobs been created to give dignified employment to the growing number of job-seekers – with high expectations but diminishing probability of actually finding work? More importantly, is the problem still a nail (water scarcity), and is the use of a hammer (dam) still the most appropriate response? 

This is where it becomes interesting, because a few new facts have been added to the equation. There is no more surface water to transfer from one basin to another. On top of this, climate variability is changing rainfall patterns and existing dams are silting up, making storage and prediction a challenge.  So, even if we have become very good at inter-basin transfers, that hammer is no longer appropriate because the problem has morphed itself into a screw and is no longer a simple nail. More importantly, public trust has been abused, as government has been transformed from a public service provider into a rent-seeking predatory machine that converts problems into patronage flows. Nowhere is this more evident than in the water sector. In 2018, the Auditor General reported a staggering R6,4 billion in fruitless and irregular expenditure, placing the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) on the list of worst performing entities on record. The purging of skills from the DWS, combined with corruption in the procurement of professional services from the consulting engineering community – the place where the intellectual property for our national water security actually resides – has left a trail of destroyed companies in its wake. Professionals have been given a stark choice to either cooperate with rent-seeking structures in government and be compromised forever, or to perish from the lack of contractual work. 

Stabilising the consulting engineering companies is a national priority

In my professional opinion, this is our current national priority. How do we stabilise the consulting engineering companies, many of which have either closed or downsized because skills have migrated offshore, as the process of deindustrialisation and decolonisation advances relentlessly to its logical conclusion? If we fail in this endeavour, then our repository of knowledge needed to create the future inclusive economic growth for restorative justice to be realised, will simply collapse. It is in this context that the mooted National Water Resources Infrastructure Agency (NWRIA) needs to be evaluated. Our unfortunate experience has been the loss of public trust in the face of massive looting, without any apparent consequence for the looters. One of the objectives of this proposed agency is to ‘streamline procurement and recruitment’, which is a code word for ‘gaining total control over the levers of patronage flows’. We now need about R1 trillion simply to restore systems that have failed because they have been looted into destruction. This is a big prize for those thriving on the future flow of patronage and is the actual target of the NWRIA.  

Focus first on creating an independent water regulator

The question that we need to reflect on as a nation, is whether this new hammer is an appropriate tool for driving a nail that has now morphed into a screw with a specific head that requires a hexagonal tool to shift? What we do know is that the Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority (TCTA) has been extremely successful as a special purpose vehicle. Where failure has occurred, it has always been when political interference has sought to wrestle control of the procurement process away from the TCTA. This means that the problem is NOT the TCTA as alleged. The real problem is the inappropriate effort by political elites to bypass procurement procedures, entrenched within the TCTA, to divert patronage flows needed to sustain the now predatory ruling elite. The problem is the lack of governance and the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by cadres connected to the ruling elite. Because this is the actual problem, the NWRIA cannot be the solution, and public debate is needed to flesh this matter out. Government’s track record in state-owned enterprises is dismal, so why create yet another? The TCTA already exists and has been extremely effective in its core role, so let us improve governance, oversight, and empower the criminal justice system to hold looters accountable, before they sink their teeth into the R1 trillion needed to restore our failing water systems. Let us focus first on creating an independent water regulator, capable of the governance and oversight needed to restore confidence in our failing economy, before we create a new machine designed to specifically gain control over future patronage flows.

• The National Water Week campaign, which took place between 15 and 22 March, is aimed at educating the public about their responsibility in water conservation initiatives, raising awareness around the need to protect and conserve the country’s water resources.

Opinion article by Prof Anthony Turton from the Centre for Environmental Management, University of the Free State

About Prof Anthony Turton:

Prof Anthony is an Affiliated Professor in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State (UFS). He specialises in strategic planning, transboundary water resource management, policy and institutional issues, conflict resolution (mitigation), political risk assessment for large infrastructural projects, and research programme design. He is also the Director of Nanodyn Systems Pty Ltd.

 

 


News Archive

Media: Sunday Times
2006-05-20

Sunday Times, 4 June 2006

True leadership may mean admitting disunity
 

In this edited extract from the inaugural King Moshoeshoe Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State, Professor Njabulo S Ndebele explores the leadership challenges facing South Africa

RECENT events have created a sense that we are undergoing a serious crisis of leadership in our new democracy. An increasing number of highly intelligent, sensitive and committed South Africans, across class, racial and cultural spectrums, confess to feeling uncertain and vulnerable as never before since 1994.

When indomitable optimists confess to having a sense of things unhinging, the misery of anxiety spreads. We have the sense that events are spiralling out of control and that no one among the leadership of the country seems to have a definitive handle on things.

There can be nothing more debilitating than a generalised and undefined sense of anxiety in the body politic. It breeds conspiracies and fear.

There is an impression that a very complex society has developed, in the last few years, a rather simple, centralised governance mechanism in the hope that delivery can be better and more quickly driven. The complexity of governance then gets located within a single structure of authority rather than in the devolved structures envisaged in the Constitution, which should interact with one another continuously, and in response to their specific settings, to achieve defined goals. Collapse in a single structure of authority, because there is no robust backup, can be catastrophic.

The autonomy of devolved structures presents itself as an impediment only when visionary cohesion collapses. Where such cohesion is strong, the impediment is only illusory, particularly when it encourages healthy competition, for example, among the provinces, or where a province develops a character that is not necessarily autonomous politically but rather distinctive and a special source of regional pride. Such competition brings vibrancy to the country. It does not necessarily challenge the centre.

Devolved autonomy is vital in the interests of sustainable governance. The failure of various structures to actualise their constitutionally defined roles should not be attributed to the failure of the prescribed governance mechanism. It is too early to say that what we have has not worked. The only viable corrective will be in our ability to be robust in identifying the problems and dealing with them concertedly.

We have never had social cohesion in South Africa — certainly not since the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. What we definitely have had over the decades is a mobilising vision. Could it be that the mobilising vision, mistaken for social cohesion, is cracking under the weight of the reality and extent of social reconstruction, and that the legitimate framework for debating these problems is collapsing? If that is so, are we witnessing a cumulative failure of leadership?

I am making a descriptive rather than an evaluative inquiry. I do not believe that there is any single entity to be blamed. It is simply that we may be a country in search of another line of approach. What will it be?

I would like to suggest two avenues of approach — an inclusive model and a counter-intuitive model of leadership.

In an inclusive approach, leadership is exercised not only by those who have been put in some position of power to steer an organisation or institution. Leadership is what all of us do when we express, sincerely, our deepest feelings and thoughts; when we do our work, whatever it is, with passion and integrity.

Counter-intuitive leadership lies in the ability of leaders to read a problematic situation, assess probable outcomes and then recognise that those outcomes will only compound the problem. Genuine leadership, in this sense, requires going against probability in seeking unexpected outcomes. That’s what happened when we avoided a civil war and ended up with an “unexpected” democracy.

Right now, we may very well hear desperate calls for unity, when the counter-intuitive imperative would be to acknowledge disunity. A declaration of unity where it manifestly does not appear to exist will fail to reassure.

Many within the “broad alliance” might have the view that the mobilising vision of old may have transformed into a strategy of executive steering with a disposition towards an expectation of compliance. No matter how compelling the reasons for that tendency, it may be seen as part of a cumulative process in which popular notions of democratic governance are apparently undermined and devalued; and where public uncertainty in the midst of seeming crisis induces fear which could freeze public thinking at a time when more voices ought to be heard.

Could it be that part of the problem is that we are unable to deal with the notion of opposition? We are horrified that any of us could be seen to have become “the opposition”. The word has been demonised. In reality, it is time we began to anticipate the arrival of a moment when there is no longer a single, overwhelmingly dominant political force as is currently the case. Such is the course of history. The measure of the maturity of the current political environment will be in how it can create conditions that anticipate that moment rather than seek to prevent it. We see here once more the essential creativity of the counter-intuitive imperative.

This is the formidable challenge of a popular post-apartheid political movement. Can it conceptually anticipate a future when it is no longer overwhelmingly in control, in the form in which it is currently, and resist, counter-intuitively, the temptation to prevent such an eventuality? Successfully resisting such an option would enable its current vision and its ultimate legacy to our country to manifest in different articulations, which then contend for social influence. In this way, the vision never really dies; it simply evolves into higher, more complex forms of itself. Consider the metaphor of flying ants replicating the ant community by establishing new ones.

We may certainly experience the meaning of comradeship differently, where we will now have “comrades on the other side”.

Any political movement that imagines itself as a perpetual entity should look at the compelling evidence of history. Few movements have survived those defining moments when they should have been more elastic, and that because they were not, did not live to see the next day.

I believe we may have reached a moment not fundamentally different from the sobering, yet uplifting and vision-making, nation-building realities that led to Kempton Park in the early ’90s. The difference between then and now is that the black majority is not facing white compatriots across the negotiating table. Rather, it is facing itself: perhaps really for the first time since 1994. Could we apply to ourselves the same degree of inventiveness and rigorous negotiation we displayed leading up to the adoption or our Constitution?

This is not a time for repeating old platitudes. It is the time, once more, for vision.

In the total scheme of things, the outcome could be as disastrous as it could be formative and uplifting, setting in place the conditions for a true renaissance that could be sustained for generations to come.

Ndebele is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and author of the novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela

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