City of Cape Town Chief Resilience Officer Craig Kesson led the city’s Water Resilience Task Team in 2017. Here he shares the sense of the weight of responsibility experienced by decision makers at the time in the face of the declining rainfall trend and the catastrophic implications for the city of a scenario without rainfall. “One must weigh up the responsibility of having to make tough, perhaps unpopular decisions with the weight of authority that lies on your shoulders against failing to provide your most basic constitutional duty which is the provision of water in local government in South Africa, which would have led to catastrophe.” Refining the decision-making parameters to a choice between unpopular decisions that would have been hard to implement versus the possible destruction of the city focused the mind.

Colin Deiner, Chief Director of Disaster Management in the Western Cape government, discusses the differences, in his experience, between rapid-onset and slow-onset disasters. With rapid-onset disasters, decisions are made very quickly by the people responding to it on the ground, who are allowed to get on with what they are doing and whose decisions are seldom questioned. With slow-onset disasters such as a drought, on the other hand, the availability of time leads to a proliferation of viewpoints among decision makers as to what should be done. “That for us was quite a big challenge, in trying to get everybody on the same page as it were as to what the objectives were.” He argues for the importance of having single leadership, as opposed to a splintered approach where various people in authority have different agendas. “I think the biggest lesson that I learnt on how things could go wrong was if you have people not understanding the true impact or the true objective of what needs to happen making decisions not based on that.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Peter Flower, the City of Cape Town’s recently retired Director of Water and Sanitation looks back on water supply system planning decisions since the start of the century, and the thinking underlying those decisions. Limited availability of new dam sites, coupled with engineering and fiscal constraints, had made it increasingly challenging to respond to the city’s growing population by building more dams, as had been done in the past. A highly successful demand management programme was then implemented by the City, resulting in greater water use efficiency being achieved, with non-revenue water and physical losses driven down to world-class levels. Despite the continuing population growth, the demand on the water supply system flatlined, never exceeding the 2000 level of demand until 2015. Supply augmentation plans were on the books, but were pushed back year after year as it did not make sense to expend large capital amounts to build these if the demand wasn’t there. “In retrospect we can now see that we were lulled into a sense of false security, that our good work done to reduce the demand had actually put us in quite a tricky position, and that we should possibly have brought forward that build programme because now the sensitivity to the drought was heightened by the fact that we’d driven our demand down and so we were already very efficient in the use of water.”

To what extent are ordinary citizens able to reduce their water use and demand on the city’s water supply system? Kim Kruyshaar, an environmentally aware and resource-conscious citizen and owner of sustainability auditor and advisor Green Audits Into Action, provides the perspective from her family’s experience. In 2006 their water use averaged 15,000 litres per month in summer and 8,000 litres per month in winter. By embarking on a rainwater harvesting project with the installation of a system of rainwater tanks on their property at negligible cost spread over time from 2006 to 2013 and becoming more careful with their water use, the household was able to cut its use of municipal water to between 1,000 and 2,000 litres per month. Their daily municipal water use varied between 31 and 94 litres per month, mostly with three people living on the property. As a result, they were comfortably able to meet the City’s requirement during the drought of a maximum use of 87 litres per person per day – while they were using more than this per person per day, they were compliant in their demand on the city’s supply system as they were being amply supplemented from their rainwater tanks.

It is important, argues Dr Gisela Kaiser, City of Cape Town Executive Director of Informal Settlements, Water and Waste during the crisis, to keep in proper perspective the volumes of water saved, produced by temporary desalination plants, and provided by rainfall. A one percentage point increase in dam levels occurred over a single weekend of rainfall in April 2018 (despite simultaneous ongoing drawdown for usage). To make that amount of fresh water from sea water would take a 100 million litre a day desalination plant three months. At the time the City was incurring substantial investment and expending massive management resources for the procurement of temporary desalination capacity of 16 million litres a day. “Really, if you need 500 million litres, 16 is not going to help you … The magnitude of what reliance on rainfall and runoff is … I don’t think many people still understand it.” Similarly for savings: as with a desalination plant, the saving of around 100 million litres per day (from city usage of around 600 to around 500 million litres per day) that came with an enormous effort, would have had to be maintained for three months to make a 1 percentage point difference in dam levels – delivered by rainfall over a weekend.

When Day Zero was announced in January 2018, tells Kim Kruyshaar, owner of sustainability auditor and advisor Green Audits Into Action, her household had enough rainwater stored in tanks on their property to last them for months. “But our big concern was: great, for us, but what about our community, what about our neighbours?” Initiatives were undertaken and plans were made in the community to ensure assistance among the members of the community during the crisis period. “We basically said: let’s choose cooperation rather than chaos, because individually we can’t live here … If we were going to survive, we were going to survive as a community … So the plan was sent to everybody to get them to understand that if we work together we’re going to be far better off than if we try and do it individually.”

Andrew Boraine, CEO of the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership, reflects on the positive aspects of the societal disruption brought about by the water crisis: community mobilisation and responsiveness, ingenuity, inventiveness, social cohesion and connection. “If the crisis had persisted and we’d got closer and closer to Day Zero, maybe even reached Day Zero and had to go into this new system ... we could have built what is most lacking in our system, ... that social cohesion and social connectiveness, given the sort of spatial-racial dislocation of our city ... We don’t face a water crisis in our city; we face a human crisis, a crisis of lack of connectivity, which then can lead to a water crisis because we don’t then work together as part of the same system. So underlying the crisis around our future relationship to natural resources sits a human question.”

“Social media has changed the game.” Based on her intensive experience during the crisis, City of Cape Town Director of Communication Priya Reddy shares her views on the pros and cons of social media from the perspective of the communications needs of a large city. Social media was a valuable mechanism enabling residents to share knowledge and ideas such as water saving tips among each other, but it also gave people who were angry at the time about what was happening a platform on which to speak, vocally venting anger and frustration. From the city government’s perspective, social media has given organisations like the City a tool to speak directly to over half a million of its residents without working via the middleman of the media, and to have a dialogue with residents. The City made use of the medium to convey messages visually, with infographics, digital calculators, and short videos communicating facts or enhancing credibility, with senior City officials explaining key aspects. “The greatest things about social media are also the worst things about social media, but there’s no avoiding it, and so we try and meet the demand and meet the expectation as much as we can, and from a communications arm do as much as we can to make people feel included in the conversation.”

Cape Town’s water crisis in 2017-2018 was preceded by a national electricity crisis in 2015. Dr Gisela Kaiser, City of Cape Town Executive Director of Informal Settlements, Water and Waste during the water crisis, points out the difference between the two instances in the management of public perceptions regarding responsibility for the crisis. During the electricity crisis, the City from the outset made it clear in communications that it was part of the scheme, buying its electricity from the national supplier and dependent on the latter’s ability to supply. “When it gets to water we were just completely silent on this and we just owned it … National should have stepped to the plate and in the media and, with the City, owned it … We just kept on taking the punches and we had to answer all the questions in the media; nobody even knew that we were a part of the system and the National Department of Water and Sanitation was the overall manager of the system, and I think that that really shot us as Cape Town in the foot … It was a misunderstood fact when the City started to communicate about the drought, so they owned it, just assuming that it was the City’s responsibility.”

“Intermittent supply means you ration water by area across the city at different times, and it’s absolutely the worst strategy to use.” Peter Flower, recently retired City of Cape Town Director of Water and Sanitation, argues the case against intermittent supply as solution in times of water shortage. Interrupting supply puts stress on the pipeline system, with resulting fatigue, failures, bursts and consequent water losses. Worse, if there are leaks in the pipelines and if there is contaminated groundwater, when you depressurise, that polluted water could find its way into the system, and then gets carried through when you pressurise again. “If you listen to the advocacy of the International Water Association they are trying to get countries and cities where this is a practice to get away from it, and I support that wholeheartedly … At the end, as your very last means, when you now have got not enough to keep a full supply continuously all the time, then one would have to step down to that, but that would be your very last means.”

The City of Cape Town installed water management devices at properties using excessive amounts of water or where households were accumulating large unpaid debts on their water bills. These devices, which automatically cut off water supply to a property for the day once usage has reached a daily quota, were always contentious and unpopular. During the crisis the installation programme was ramped up and extended. Thabo Lusithi, Western Cape Water Caucus coordinator employed by civil society organisation Environmental Monitoring Group, shares the views from some of the poor communities where water management devices were concentrated. Frequent complaints include devices malfunctioning or leaking, being an obstacle to monitoring of water use by the household as it is a locked meter, shoddy workmanship on installation, insufficient communication with households, and the device being used mainly as a debt recovery tool targeted at poor areas.

Shortly after the crisis the municipal water tariff, dramatically ramped up during the crisis to discourage water use, was reduced again. David Green, CEO of the V&A Waterfront, site of one of the three temporary desalination plants installed during the crisis, highlights the unavoidable impact of this price reduction on the economic viability of alternative sources of water such as desalination. “The City has reduced the tariff for water below a level that is economic to produce water through desalination … Almost too quickly, you could argue that we’ve reduced the value of water to consumers and to commercial entities, and therefore you’ve turned the essential experimentation, development, refining of alternatives to rainwater, you’ve actually disincentivized the research and the refining and the evolution, this process that has to go through … Almost inadvertently, I think the almost haste to reduce the tariff has resulted in people questioning what I think are essential technological refinement and advance of alternative supplies of water.”

Its virtually exclusive reliance on surface water schemes – a system of dams in the catchment areas dependent on runoff from rainfall – made the Western Cape water supply system vulnerable to prolonged droughts as occurred during 2015 to 2017. Groundwater extracted from aquifers below the surface as an alternative to rain-fed dams became an area of focus during the crisis. This raises the issue of the management of groundwater as a public resource, points out Claire Pengelly, GreenCape water programme manager. “I think there’s a lack of awareness of how groundwater and aquifers are really interlinked systems, that it is still a resource that is still fed by rainfall and is still reliant on rainfall, and because the kind of monitoring and management of the system isn’t happening at the scale at which it … should be … there’s a lack of understanding of the cumulative impact of all the groundwater abstraction that is happening by all the users in the system … We know of hundreds of businesses that have invested in their own groundwater resources, we’ve heard anecdotally of thousands of citizens doing the same, so no one has an exact clear picture of what the situation really is, but there’s a real concern as to the sustainability of the resource into the future.”

Khiyam Fredericks, National Technical Manager at insurer Old Mutual, points out the importance for users of boreholes to constantly monitor groundwater quality with regular testing for safety. He shares an experience on Old Mutual’s Cape Town head office premises of pump failure due to rust as a result of the doubling of the measured iron level of the groundwater over a twelve-month period after installation. “What this highlights to us is that there is so much variables with regards to groundwater that it makes me very nervous … These borehole systems that are being installed on a sort of private capacity within our communities, people who are installing boreholes at home, how are we actually testing the water content on a regular basis … and the safety levels within our water that is being supplied out of our ground? It needs to be tested regularly. So it’s a bit of a scary sort of learning that I’ve had significantly, just on the iron content that we’ve experienced at our premises, what about all the other sort of variables that you can’t control? It shows you that one needs to be very sort of careful with what you are doing.”

Kim Kruyshaar, owner of sustainability auditor and advisor Green Audits Into Action, discusses her fears as a citizen during the water crisis about the possible serious risks to public health in the event of failures of sanitation if the reticulation system was affected. “I really believed that the City would have enough potable water for us, but I was extremely concerned personally that we would have potential disease issues around blocked sewers, and if they block up and there’s not enough water to get rid of the blockage it literally will block up into your house … In a drought situation you don’t have water to get rid of that … You actually have sewage in your home – that is a potentially very very scary situation in terms of disease.”

“Water is not an environmental concern only; water is also a really important economic concern, and we have to think a bit further into the future as to what the costs are to employment, to growth, to development if we don’t have a stable and secure water future.” Claire Pengelly, GreenCape water programme manager, discusses some of the concerns relating to the economic impacts of the region’s future water situation. “Some of the systems and municipalities are really over-allocated, so that basically means they’re using more water than they should be, and that if you project their economic growth forward, that actually they’re not going to have the water available to be able to support their economy, unless some significant new supplies start coming on board.” While the City of Cape Town is highly capacitated and able to implement corrective measures, there are other, smaller municipalities in the region without the resources, capacity or attention to do so. As a result, their economies are at risk of shocks and constraints as future water supply falls short of demand.

“I’ve learnt,” says Western Cape Economic Development Partnership CEO Andrew Boraine, "that there’s a new way of doing development. I think we have to pay equal attention to how we organise what I call the top-down, authorising environment – the stuff of policies and rules and committees and governance structures and mandates and things like that, and funding – and the bottom-up mobilising environment.” He argues that while both of these systems are required, they typically find it difficult to talk to each other and work together, tending to be threatened by each other. As a result there is a missing piece in the middle: “I think there’s a need more than ever before to provide the translation service, and the … governance structures that link the top-down authorising environment better to the bottom-up mobilising environment.”

George Gabriel, independent social anthropologist, consultant and facilitator, discusses four problem areas in the working of the democratic process he experienced and observed during the crisis: silo-based bureaucracy with ego-based decision making, the lack of meaningful engagement in modern democracy, a lack of acceptance of a change in conditions, with a resulting lack of urgency to confront the crisis, and a lack of trust between key players. “To solve that, we need to do the opposite of those four. We need to think in terms of diversity. We need to include people in meaningful processes. We need to engage citizens in a way that they feel completely respected, first and foremost. Third is we need to accept the change in conditions or just the reality of the conditions, which is climate change is real, this city doesn’t have the resources to deal with all of these problems, it must reach out and interact with its business and civil-society community in a different way. And we have to build trust, and to build trust means that those of us who are used to existing in certain silos, whether personally or professionally, need to make an effort to step out of that.”

Amanda Gcanga is a researcher with the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership and a doctoral student in water governance at Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Complex Systems in Transition. “I grew up in rural Eastern Cape,” she says, “and the relationship I have with water when I am back home and the relationship that I have with water here [in Cape Town] is completely different.” In her village they had never had reliable access to water, and there is no dependency on government to provide. The water crisis brought the contrast in stark relief for her when she saw city dwellers articulating their right to access to water. “It made me think about the different types of South Africans that enjoy certain rights and some South Africans that don’t enjoy certain rights. And that I could be in Cape Town and find it unacceptable that I might not have access to water but when I’m back in my village I find it acceptable and life goes on and no one complains. And so for me that was a very challenging experience to be a South African in these different contexts.”

Politicians and bureaucrats are locked into a mutually dependent relationship. Respectively embodying representative will and technical expertise, they have to work together, playing different roles within the same system aimed at the delivery of public good. Craig Kesson, City of Cape Town Chief Resilience Officer, gives an exposition of the respective roles and functions of the politician and the bureaucrat, and articulates his views of the nuances, strengths and challenges of the relationship. “It’s a very strange relationship at times, because you essentially are creating a dual star system and the success and failure of both is dependent on each other … So these people have to find a way to work together and to trust each other … Inasmuch as there’s a virtue of trust, there’s also a virtue of tension, which can be a healthy tension, I think, of the bureaucrat saying, well, things are complex, and it takes time to do, versus the political leader who says, well, we don’t have all the time in the world, and we cannot just wait for things to unfold as and when they will. But you have to have the reasonable marriage of both perspectives in order to do something, otherwise you lose all trust and the tension becomes unbearable because you have an unrealistic expectation on the one hand or complete non-delivery of a mandate on the other … It is at heart a professional relationship, and if you don’t get it right – and getting it right I think means there have to be very clear rules of the game – then you often find that the tremendous strengths that both positions are supposed to bring to their roles are lost.”