South Africa: Spiting Itself

"The Western Cape is about to reach Day Zero, when the taps will run dry. The Israeli government approached the ruling ANC party to offer solutions years ago, but the ANC turned them down and adopted a pro-Palestinian stance."
"This petition demands that the ANC cease importing the politics of the Middle East and taking an anti-Israel unilateral stance. We demand that the South African government commence immediate talks with Israel to ask for help with solving our water crisis."
Cape Town petition of desperation

"The rug has been pulled from the Israeli ambassador, who will not be able to exploit our very serious water crises for his own cheap publicity and whitewashing of his regime."
"Israeli water technology is not unique or special; such technology is widely available through other more friendly countries."
South African wing, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)

Sorek Desalination Plant, Israel is located about 15km south of Tel Aviv, Israel and opened in October 2013 with a seawater treatment capacity of 624 000m³/day, making it world's biggest seawater desalination plant.
Image credit: Wordpress

"The Western Cape is the only province in the country run by the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance ... this means that the relationship between national government and the Western Cape is complicated, as the water crisis shows."
"Two tiers of governance – the Western Cape province and the City of Cape Town – went above and beyond what was required to prepare for drought. The system failed, however, at the level of national government."
"Wasteful expenditure in the national department of water and sanitation, erroneous water allocations to agriculture and a failure to acknowledge or respond to provincial and municipal help obstructed timely interventions."
"National government’s numerous spanners jammed up the works of a system that could have managed the crisis quite effectively."
David W Olivier, ‘Cape Town’s water crisis: driven by politics more than drought’

"There is nothing Israel can do to save Cape Town right now ... it takes two to three years to build a desalination plant and there is no quicker solution than that. The only thing Capetonians can do is to reduce consumption and save water, in order to get us to winter."
"Israel has never offered South Africa a free desalination plant, but its companies have been invited to tender and its assistance has never been formally turned down."
"There is no doubt that corruption has led to the collapse of infrastructure."
DA [Democratic Alliance] councillor Errol Anstey, Capetown

Cape Town has started down the road of desalination. Shutterstock

It is certainly not for lack of trying that Israel's efforts to convince South Africa it could be effective in stemming the inevitable tide of water shortage in Cape Town, much less in all of South Africa has ultimately failed. For years the previous Israeli Ambassador to South Africa appealed to President Jacob Zuma and his cabinet to allow Israeli technology, the best in the world in desalinization, to build badly needed plants for South Africa. The result has been a total spurning of Israel's offers.

Now Cape Town, the second-largest city in South Africa, a tourism draw and a major developed city, is on the cusp of being without water. Its three-year-old drought in Western Cape province where Cape Town is the provincial capital and economic powerhouse has brought the dams which the city is reliant on for its water to a perilously low supply level. No rain is forecast for the near future. But this is not an emergency that has recently emerged with no warning. An escalating water shortage has been a reality for decades.

The alarm was sounded about the city's looming crisis over two years ago; ample time to plan, develop and implement an effectively responsive plan of action to meet the challenge. The time is now fast approaching when the dams reflect a 13.5 percent capacity and the water authority will be mandated to turn off all taps across the city. That date is expected to arrive early in June. It was slated for arrival two months earlier, but stringent conservation methods reduced daily water use below 550 million litres from over a billion litres, resulting in a two-month reprieve.

Moody's ratings agency has warned of a likely credit downgrade on the basis that in recognition of the city's income inequality the water crisis may trigger a threat to social order. As the only South African province not controlled by the African National Congress, the Western Cape is governed by the opposition Democratic Alliance, a liberal party reflecting the membership of liberal whites, "Cape Coloured", ethnic groups and urban, educated blacks fed up with the ANC's corruption and mismanagement.

The national government, hoping that Cape Town's threat on the water issue would reflect badly on the opposition party and lead to its failure linking it to the water failure, disregarding the simple fact that water-supply infrastructure is an obligation of the national government, not a provincial government blithely ignored the coming crisis. The ANC government did little to plan effectively for badly needed new water infrastructure, as a result. That, along with the ANC's ideological identity caused the avoidance of its responsibilities.

The linkage is clear in that Israel's ambassador to South Africa two years earlier was slated to address an international conference on South Africa's water  crisis to be held in Johannesburg. As the global leader in water conservation, recycling and irrigation and its offer of cutting-edge desalinization technology, this would have been the time to make important decisions. Instead, the conference was cancelled, reflecting political pressure from the BDS South African wing.

Despite the constant snubs, the former and the current Israeli ambassadors continued to offer aid in Cape Town's water crisis only to be rebuffed each time. Since the South African government has signed on to boycotting Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, the issue remained in limbo. Hamas took part in the ANCs National Conference in December and it was at that conference that the ANC made their decision to downgrade the status of South Africa's embassy in Israel to a "liaison office" and an announcement of intent was made triumphantly public.

The citizens of South Africa and those living in Cape Town will pay the price. Israel's expertise reflecting 70 years of research, benefits not only Israel itself, but the Palestinians and Jordan both of which in the midst of an arid desert environment, are provided with water security provided to them through Israeli auspices. And they are not the only countries of the Middle East which have turned to Israel for the technology to benefit themselves in water security.

Cape Town is now in the throes of building desalinization plants, but they will not be on stream for years, while the city will be facing the dilemma of its extreme shortage in the very immediate future, swiftly approaching. And even when those plants are built, there and elsewhere in South Africa, some experts believe they will be unable to provide all of the water that the country requires.

Solidarity forever.

Cities like Cape Town may now have to rely on desalination to help them survive drought.

Morgana Wingard/Getty Images

Iran's Real and Most Pressing Existential Problem

People protest near the University of Tehran on Dec 30 in this picture obtained from social media. Iran is the latest example of a country where a water crisis, long in the making, has fed popular discontent. Photo: Twitter/@kasra_nouri/via Reuters

"[Water stress is slated to become] a growing factor in the world's hot spots and conflict areas."
"With escalating global population  and the impact of a changing climate, we see the challenges of water stress rising with time."
CNA report, Arlington, Virginia

"Water is not going to bring down the government [of Iran]. But it's a component -- in some towns, a significant component -- of grievances and frustrations."
"[Twelve of the country's 31 provinces] will entirely exhaust their aquifers within the next fifty years."
David Michel, analyst, Stimson Center, Washington

"Twenty-five percent of the total water that is withdrawn from aquifers, rivers and lakes [in Iran] exceeds the amount that can be replenished [by nature]."
World Bank report

Egyptians enjoy a boat ride along the Nile River, in Cairo, Egypt. (Photo credit: AP/Hassan Ammar)

Two scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a study in 2015 predicting that at current rates of global warming, "many major cities in the region [of the Middle East] could exceed a tipping point for human survival". Scientists have long warned that diminishing supplies of fresh water across the globe will result in increased levels of conflict representing the desperation that deprived countries finding themselves without adequate water supplies bring to contest neighbours' supplies.

Most recently, a transborder water dispute has engaged both Egypt and Ethiopia as the Blue Nile is being harnessed by Ethiopia building a dam to ensure water retention, while Egypt is furious, claiming that Egypt's agriculture will be destroyed by the diversion prospects of the largest dam in Africa. Construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has seen Egypt threatening military strikes should its neighbour continue to ignore its protests.

And while Ethiopian officials stated that "the diversion of the Blue Nile will not affect Egypt's share of the water", Egyptian officials released a statement saying that "Egypt supports any development project for the Nile Basin countries, as long as it does not damage the downstream countries Egypt and Sudan." Egypt characterized Ethiopia's determination to divert the Nile as a plot hatched between it and Israel to deprive Egypt of water, bringing the spectre of food insufficiency to the country.

At the height of the controversy in 2013, Abdel Bari Atwan in the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi charged that "The construction of this dam… is the result of instigation by Israel. Avigdor Liberman, the Israeli foreign minister who threatened to bomb the Aswan dam and flood Egypt, led a delegation of 100 businessmen and engineers with expertise in the construction of dams to five (Nile Basin) African countries. This was poisonous for previous water arrangements. Now Israeli companies have signed contracts to take over energy distribution from the new dam. Israel is exploiting the collapse of Egypt and the hunger of its people."

The Islamic Republic of Iran is focusing on consolidating its influence and power in the Middle East in a Shiite crescent elbowing the Sunni majority Arab Middle East and Saudi Arabia aside to once again occupy the position Persia held in antiquity as the centre of Middle East power. With the advent of climate change and the very real and obvious changes that have been taking place worldwide, Iran stands out as one of those nations that will be the most adversely affected with a parched landscape due to water scarcity.

Even one of its own, a former Iranian agriculture minister, Issa Kalantari, stated at one time that the prospect of water scarcity would result in Iran becoming so harsh that 50 million Iranians would be persuaded by desperation in its lack, to voluntarily exile themselves from their country of birth. Water scarcity is increasingly making it more difficult for the theocratic government to deliver vital services to its population. A situation which, in part, spurred the recent widespread protests so concerning in their adamant rejection of the regime.

In the wake of the 1979 revolution, Iran purposed to become self-sufficient in food. Iranian water expert Kaveh Madani explained that the government then encouraged farmers to plant crops such as water-thirsty wheat, offering farmers cheap electricity and favourable wheat profits as an incentive to plant more water-intensive-need-grains and to achieve that, to extract increasing amounts of groundwater, a process leading inevitably to groundwater depletion

In rural areas, rivers were dammed across the country to divert water to areas considered key to curry favour with farmers. That had the result of shrinking many of Iran's lakes, including Lake Urmia, the region's largest, diminished in size now by close to 90 percent since the early 1970s, with no prospect of the lake recovering. Climate change has resulted in a future of a 25 percent decline in surface water runoff from rainfall and melting snow by 2030,

Summers are projected to become hotter by two to three degrees Celsius, should current warming rates prevail, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, while rain is expected to decline by ten percent. There is always Syria's example, should any have doubts about what lies in store. The drought experienced by Syria from 2006 to 2009 was responsible for a mass migration from country to city and collapsed employment for the young.

In 2011 street protests erupted and were crushed by the Shiite government of Bashar al-Assad. A half-million dead Sunni Syrians resulted from that initial attempt by Syrians to broker a more even situation for themselves in the spirit of sectarian equality in their nation of birth. As for Iran, it would do well to remove its ayatollahs and mullahs from power, sweep away the Republican Guard Corps, make peace with Israel, and invite its engineers and water desalination technology to reverse the damage done by the ruinous policies of the Iranian Revolution.