Cape Town is heading fast towards Day Zero, the moment when it becomes the first big city on an already troubled continent to run dry. The idea of water as the new oil, precious for its scarcity, has long been a journalistic shorthand for a predicament no one wants to face: cities are growing faster than the water supplies on which they depend. Water, like oil, stokes international tension and social disorder. Its absence brings disease and misery. Cape Town’s crisis is that of modern urbanisation, the trek to the real or imagined prosperity of cities. Some two thirds of the world’s population are expected to live in cities by 2030. If those cities lack water, the dream of urbanisation will founder.
The second city of South Africa, with four million inhabitants, is a victim of poor budget planning bound too closely to the election cycle and the wish of populist politicians to rally voters with handouts. The tension between the Democratic Alliance-led government of Western Cape and the national leadership of the African National Congress has compounded the problem. The central government has little interest, it seems, in the success of Cape Town and no incentive to devote long-term planning to its water management. The first lesson of the crisis on the Cape is that it cannot be averted without good governance, which requires wise and urgent coordination between the centre and the periphery.
Dam levels of usable water in and around Cape Town are at 17 per cent of normal quantities after three years of drought. Unless the winter rains come unusually early, water will have to be shut off in ten weeks’ time. The result will be emergency rationing. Residents are boarding up swimming pools and hotels are washing less laundry.
This is only a foretaste of what is to come. Planners must think twice before giving per- mission for the construction of yet more thirsty golf courses. Phoenix in Arizona, struggling with shortages since the 1990s, has mobilised plumbers to plug 7,000 miles of leaking pipes, pushed businesses into actively conserving water and encouraged residents to abandon grass for cacti.
Cape Town, and much larger African cities including Lagos and Cairo, can learn from such practice. They must, however, be prepared to take politically unpopular decisions. Larger shares of tax revenue will have to be earmarked for water conservation. Desalination plants are expensive but they are an essential part of the solution. Egypt, in a dispute with Ethiopia and Sudan about its share of water from the depleted Nile, is ploughing more than £2 billion into cost-effective water treatment and desalination.
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Across Africa, governments must think how best to adapt farming to an age when water shortages become the norm. Waste water will have to be re-used for irrigation. Genetically modified drought-resistant crops will have to replace existing ones. If governments dodge these challenges, the predictions are dire: total water demand in the Middle East and North Africa exceeds naturally available water supplies by about 20 per cent. That under-supply is predicted to increase tenfold, as populations grow, threatening instability from Morocco to Syria.
Africa’s rapid urban growth is the key to its modernisation but its infrastructure has to keep pace and its governors have to see beyond the next electoral horizon. If the political class fails, thirst could stop Africa’s development in its tracks.