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Already rationed to just 50 litres of water per person per day, Day Zero, April 21, is when Cape Town will run out of water.
While we tease, mock or just feel sorry for Capetonians we, as a country, are failing to realise the true nature and depth of this crisis.
This should serve as a national warning. A warning about how critical the country’s water resources are and just how fragile the water ecosystem is. It also serves to demonstrate how deeply we rely on the precious little we have.
Inane jokes aside, the economic devastation the Western Cape province is going to endure is dramatic. Job losses are estimated at 50 000. Puree plants are not opening, grape crops are under threat, the very heart of the economy is in danger and this is no laughing matter.
We are one as a country, but there is no national ownership of the problem, which must be treated as a national emergency. There is no national mobilisation from provinces that are not under water distress to offer a plan of action to alleviate the crisis. It just seems so far away.
There is no sense of South African solidarity, a solidarity that should be developed and harnessed. We would do well to remember that no man is an island.
Importantly, the minister in charge of South Africa’s water has been conspicuously absent from this dialogue. It is only the City of Cape Town that has been actively searching for solutions, from desalination to drilling into aquifers.
Those of us who receive summer rains would do well to remember that if the rains had not been as significant as they were, Free State, North West, Gauteng, Limpopo, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal would be in the same state of water stress and we certainly wouldn’t be making jokes.
It is every citizen’s duty to do all in his or her power to preserve this precious and tenuous resource.
