Water crisis: It’s not about when or how much you can water your garden. It’s about how ongoing mismanagement and environmental damage have ruined resources
Eddie Koch
A front-page article in a national newspaper recently reported on how the Johannesburg city council was encouraging suburban residents to spy on neighbours who might be illegally watering their gardens.
The report was a classic example of the way ordinary folk who water their gardens or clean their motor cars with hosepipes have been identified as the main culprits for South Africa’s present water crisis — and have been subjected to the only major efforts to conserve this resource.
But the story of the Olifants River (see below) shows that the country’s flood of water problems has at its fountainhead a body of water law made up of regulations that were drafted up to 300 years ago when water scarcity was not a problem.
“Two primary legal constraints are ‘private water’ and ‘riparian rights’. Private water essentially includes rainfall, soil water and ground water occurring on or underneath private land, together with streams which rise and flow over a single piece of private land. The state has little control over what a private landowner does with his private water. South African water law does not recognise the hydrological cycle as an indivisible continuum, nor does it acknowledge water as a national asset,” says Simon Forster, special adviser to Water Minister Kader Asmal.
“Water flowing in a public stream (any stream which is not deemed to be private) is public water. However private landowners can and do have rights to divert and use a portion of both the normal and surplus flow of a public stream. Riparian water rights from part of the title deeds of land and were originally granted when river utilisation was negligible. Today, with the immense pressure on water resources, riparian land owners are technically and legally capable of pumping many rivers dry, particularly during low-flow periods.”
Forster estimates that more than 65 percent of all water currently used in South Africa is either privately owned or used under historically obtained riparian rights. Private water used up by the accelerated pumping of groundwater, dryland and rain-fed farming — including forest plantations — and the proliferation of small dams on farms has resulted in a huge decrease in water reaching rivers.
Says Forster: “When viewed in conjunction with the expansion in irrigation that has taken place during the last two decades, the conclusion can be made that a relatively small number of landowners now control the greater portion of the nation’s utilisable water.”
He points out that the average irrigation water required for one hectare of land is enough to meet the domestic needs of almost 900 people a year. Water losses associated with the supply of irrigation water are around 30 percent. A one- percent reduction to 29 percent would meet the basic water needs of nine million people.
Water restrictions imposed on urban consumers and increased tariffs on users of bulk water from government dams, mainly municipalities and large industries, are one way of ensuring that water is conserved.
But government-owned water is just a tiny proportion of the resource and the only long-term solution lies in a thorough overhaul of the country’s water law to allow the state to regain control of the bulk of water resources and allocate these in a planned and equitable way.
The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry has begun to do just that, by preparing a White Paper on water law reform. This will allow for the creation of catchment authorities that will have real powers to allocate and control water use. In this way rivers like the Olifants can be better cared for and used by a greater proportion of the population — instead of being subjected to an unregulated system that encourages the owner-takes-all principle.
But organised commercial agriculture, which feels under siege from new land restitution and redistribution laws, has already indicated it will fiercely resist any initiatives that will erode their rights to water — especially at a time when years of drought have pushed many farmers to the wall.
The owners of large agricultural estates and plantations will also be emboldened by property clauses in the interim Constitution that are interpreted by many as a protection of their land and thus riparian and private water rights.
In 1852, Chief Seattle wrote an often-quoted letter in response to US government requests for title to his peoples’ land. It said: “How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? … The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst … So you must give to the rivers the kindness that would give any brother.”
In South Africa, the waters have been bought and sold under a system of private management that defies compassion.
“This highly distorted access to natural resources is not the fault of the ‘haves’. Large-scale bulk water users such as forestry, agriculture and municipalities are merely responding to the legal circumstances concerning the control of water,” says Forster.
‘The fault lies with the laws which govern the ownership, allocation, access to, use and management of water, and the political system which maintained such laws.” The only solution, he says, is for the state to take back public ownership of the rivers and the groundwater.
The problem is that civil strife in South Africa is more likely to take place over water reform than the land that is often mistakenly described as the most heavily contested resource in this country.