Joburg water crisis: Expert says warnings were ignored for years

Advocacy group WaterCan this week claimed there is a lack of political will to tackle Johannesburg’s long-running water crisis.

Several areas in the city have been without running water for weeks, and residents are facing prolonged outages and unreliable tanker deliveries.

Officials blame extremely high water consumption, but experts say it's down to ageing infrastructure and poor governance.

"Their incompetence, greed and corruption caused all of this," said WaterCan director Dr Ferrial Adam, while adding that political complacency has exacerbated the situation.

His comments are backed up by a local water resource management specialist who predicted the city's crisis over a decade ago.

Prof Anthony Turton, formerly of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), says this moment was predictable.

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He recalls meetings between water experts and government officials several years ago where concerns fell on deaf ears.

"The government does not want to listen to science. Government is driven by ideology, and science is driven by fact."

Turton says this became an overarching dilemma within the scientific community.

"How do we communicate our science to a government that doesn't want to listen?"

He says the solution was to focus on the public, rather than politicians, and to inform citizens about the impact of science on their lives.

"We brought some top scientists in the world to Pretoria to the CSIR, and we had a major workshop on this thing, and we published a book called Governance as a Trialogue."

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Turton, who was once suspended by the CSIR for insubordination over a presentation he was to deliver about South Africa’s water crisis, says his role at the time was to serve the government and reassure the public that the government had the situation under control.

"But it was clear government was under control, so that whole messaging about the slow onset disaster created the impression that it could be fixed some time down the road, whereas in reality, in 2002, it was known to be a major calamity."

The escalating crisis has led to President Cyril Ramaphosa pledging investment in water security and infrastructure during his State of the Nation Address.

Ramaphosa also announced the establishment of a National Water Crisis Committee, which he will chair, similar to the one he set up three years ago to deal with the energy crisis.

To listen to Turton in conversation with Lester Kiewit on CapeTalk, use the audio player below: