If you watch the news or listen to the radio, you can’t miss the hot topic of ‘Day Zero’.
A quick Google news search on ‘Day Zero’ yields over 17-million hits in less than 30 seconds.
For those of you in the dark, Day Zero is the projected date when the Western Cape will run out of water.
The date currently stands at April 16.
The ongoing drought in the Western Cape was for the most part caused by below average rainfall over the past three years.
The rest of the country is watching with bated breath and has started helping out in every way it can.
Springsites are collecting water to donate to people in the Western Cape, and companies such as Coca-Cola have promised to donate millions of litres of water to Capetonians.
This is all very heart-warming, and it restores your faith in people to see how they come together in times of crisis.
For some, however, this concern and flurry of fundraising leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
People who live in rural areas struggle daily to get clean drinking water.
They walk for miles to the nearest water source just to fill a 25-litre container of water.
Many rely on Jojo tanks to collect rainwater so they can have a steady supply of water.
Last year, residents of the Free State experienced their worst drought in recent years.
The water levels in the Fika-Pasto Dam were so low that the Maluti-a-Phufong water authority was forced to stop pumping water from the dam in December 2017.
This dam supplies 85 per cent of the water to Qwaqwa.
The residents of this poor under-resourced town were forced to walk over 10km to the nearest town for water.
It was a humanitarian crisis, but where was the outrage?
In 2015, when there was a crippling drought in KwaZulu-Natal, where were the water donation projects?
One cannot avoid hearing about the Western Cape and how they will suffer, but what about the people who live in this water-less reality?
Why are we not donating water to them?
Is it because the places they live in are not as economically powerful as the Western Cape?
Is it because the majority of those who suffer are poor, unemployed people?
Is it because the people of the Western Cape know how make noise about an issue and ask for help?
Is it because the Democratic Alliance has been so vocal about the water crisis?
I don’t know.
What I do not know is that our selective outrage when things happen in some parts of the country compared to others is sickening.
Why do we value human life more when the people affected are rich and powerful?
We may not want to admit this, we may even deny it, but at the end of the day, our actions speak louder than our words.
We did not have these water donation projects then.
We may not even have heard that those places were going through a drought.
We need to do better.
We are all to blame.
As the media, we need to stop this practice of thinking only events that occur in big cities or provinces matter.
As people, we need start valuing human life equally.
For those who are helping in their small way by contributing a bottle of water here and there, thank you.
Keep up the good work.
