The water crisis Turton warned about in 2008 has developed exactly as he foresaw

Levels of public misery are scaling new heights. Or to be more accurate, systemic breakdowns that have long been endemic in rural South Africa have come to town.

Already electricity is not available nationwide or at least a third of every day. This week, the six million people living in greater Johannesburg were hit out by a massive collapse in water supplies. None of this comes out of the blue. South Africa has been urbanising at a rapid rate and eGoli is a magnet for migrants from all over Africa.

While the city’s population was growing by an estimated 150 000 arrivals annually, the city’s infrastructure was not only not being expanded, but was steadily deteriorating. Nor is this anything new. All the major urban centres recently have been, or are in, the throes of water supply collapses.

More pertinently, in the vast hinterlands, the bleak future now dawning on our cities arrived years ago. Many towns, villages and rural areas have long since moved beyond the tipping point, to a near complete collapse of the water supply.

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In the past decade, KwaZulu-Natal’s lower South Coast, once a major local and international tourist destination, has seen arrivals plummet and property prices take a hammering because the Ugu district municipality and Ugu Water have presided over the destruction of the region’s water infrastructure.

On top of a lack of maintenance and upgrading, it’s the now usual story: corruption, sabotage by disaffected employees, the appointment to senior positions of unqualified staff (ANC cadres and lots of nepotism) and the widespread absence of necessary technical skills.

There is at least one person who must be watching this unfold with a certain schadenfreude.

In 2008, Dr Anthony Turton, a water expert with an international reputation, was suspended and then fired by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research for “insubordination” and “bringing it into disrepute”.

Turton’s sin was that he argued for an “urgent, well-designed and informed intervention”, failing which the dramatic decline in infrastructural development, compounded by the loss of human resources, would cause a “significant crisis” both in the amount of water available and its quality.

The water crisis, he said in an international conference address that he was banned from delivering, was ultimately existentially far more serious than the electricity crisis, which had then just erupted.

For former president Thabo Mbeki, notoriously thin-skinned about criticism, this was pretty much tantamount to treason from a public service employee. But also, in the era where Mbeki was punting to international investors an “African Renaissance”, Taunton made the fatal mistake of outlining the political factors that would accelerate decline if they remained unaddressed.

He wrote that the electricity crisis marked for South Africa the end of the “Uhuru Decade”. This phenomenon, he wrote, had been manifesting throughout Africa when liberation movements inherited infrastructure that worked for about 10 years, “before starting to break down through lack of investment in operation, maintenance and skilled human capacity”.

“In South Africa’s case that infrastructure was particularly robust, so it has lasted a decade and a half. But it is now clearly under pressure and if left alone, will collapse piece by piece, in the mid-term future,” Turton wrote in his doomed speech.

The rest is history.

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Mbeki has since publicly apologised for the ANC policy failures that knee-haltered Eskom and persist to this day, slowly strangling the economy. And the water crisis that Taunton warned about in 2008 has developed exactly as he foresaw.

I’m sure all of South Africa is looking forward to another ANC apology at the presidential level.