Water and Sanitation

The SABC treated the gullible South African public to yet another series of excuses and promises in regard to the supply of water and sanitation on Tuesday, November 25, 2014.  The Minister responsible (if that concept can be applied to a Minister in the ANC Government) stated that the Department of Water Affairs needed to ‘up its publicity’, to improve the communication with the public about the activities of the Department.  She was proud to declare that it was the Department that had broken the news that the ‘bucket system’ of sanitation would not meet its targets for December, set in May.  She also announced that plans were afoot to nationalise all water supplies.  The final item of her talk was a plea to the voting public to vote for the ANC in 2016, so that the Party could, finally, implement the plans it has been preparing for the past twenty years.  Of course, she admitted that many of the problems in the supply of water and sanitation services stemmed from corruption and the employment of unqualified and incompetent staff.  She stated that active programs were under way to correct situations leading to the waste of water through leaks.

One would be excused for going to sleep during such an address.  The plans have been made and repeated, year after year, for as long as the ANC has been in power.  It would be a relief to the tens of thousands of people suffering acute water shortage to know that they will no longer have to buy water from the truckers, who fill their tanks with water stolen from public resources and transport it the three kilometres to the users, as they have been doing for twenty years.  That relief would come, regardless of the fact that the cost of provision of that water is three times what it should have been, because the corruption involved in granting the contract to lay the pipeline has bled off so much of the limited funds available.  The only people who would regret that development, something that would be taken for granted in any modern democracy, would be the public and political employees who are so much a part of the skimming.

The Minister, her predecessors, and their bosses, the State Presidents, have been making the same sort of statements and admissions for two decades now.  They might have been credible during the first three years of ANC rule.  After all, it does take time to correct the efficient systems that the Apartheid Government put in place!  Now, after twenty years, there have been no credible actions to improve the situation, no criminal convictions for corruption for theft of any Minister or Deputy Minister.  The State President remains free to refuse to account to Parliament for the funds expended on his private home, with the Deputy President making the excuse that the State President should not be subjected to robust questioning in regard to an action found by the Public Protector to be unjust.  It is notable that the State President has not been seen in Parliament since that questioning, preferring to spend his time at the G20 and the African Union, spending taxpayers’ money and grandstanding, without benefit to the South African economy or the people.  There have been no visible actions against those who misuse public funds, no criminal actions against those who lie about their qualifications to get lucrative public positions (indeed, the ANC announced that it would retain the services of “Dr.” Pallo Jordan, who unusually, resigned his position after it was disclosed that his doctorate was not recognised in South Africa).  The Minister evaded answering a question about the waste of water resulting from pipe leakages, probably the result of years of lack of maintenance of the infrastructure or, in the case of the infrastructure laid down by the New South Africa, from the inferior design, workmanship and materials resulting from contracts being handed at high prices to favoured contractors, whose sole purpose in the contract was to maximise their profit.  Her sole bit of information in that regard was that the Department now has a program employing children to correct the situation.  One wonders what a child could do, that cannot be done by the supposedly qualified and trained employees of the Department.  One’s thoughts go to a vision of twenty-three employees of the Department of Water Affairs, diligently removing alien trees from a length of riverside, less than a hundred metres from the sea at Hartenbos, presumably as part of a plan to preserve the water that would otherwise flow into the sea less than a minute later!  Attentive observers will recall the interview of the State President by a sycophantic SABC interviewer after the State of the Nation address a few years ago, in which Zuma noted a series of areas in which the Government had failed to meet the expectations of the electorate over the years, and promised to do better in the future.  He pointed out that many of the failures were the responsibility of the ‘previous Administration’, but failed to state that the ‘previous Administration’ was also an ANC Government.  Apparently, The ANC is totally renewed at each election, sloughing off the tarnished old skin of the past five years, to start making the same mistakes and repeating the same criminal actions, unblemished and not responsible for its failings in the past!

And all the time, the country struggles on, the burden of ANC mismanagement and demonstrably poor planning and policymaking growing ever greater.  The hopes of the new democracy have died, along with the cyclically good agricultural seasons, leaving behind a country that is poorer, weaker, slipping in its economic dominance in Africa, losing friends among the economically powerful nations while it strengthens its ties with those countries that support terrorism and exercise military dominance over other, more democratic nations.

It is clear to any thinking person that, if we really want to correct the problems of the recent past, we must get rid of those who caused the problems, and start anew, with a group of honest, competent and trustworthy politicians, preferably people who are willing to come clean with the voters and the taxpayers, and who are willing to turn their hopeful words into concrete action.