“Yes, there are studies going on and I certainly resort occasionally to the U.S. Pentagon-funded Minerva Program, which works with University of Texas in Sussex, to identify the correlations between social protests and anger and frustration, fury really on the one hand, and the climate crisis. As we've seen in many African sites and you could look at Syria, you could look at many other places, these are the sites where we're beginning to find massive rebellions emerging.” Patrick Bond
Cape Town, South Africa has implemented new emergency water restrictions today as the sprawling metropolis of 4 million prepares for the day their water taps run dry. Day Zero is the dreaded day when the water runs out and it has now been moved forward once again to April 12th as conditions continue to deteriorate.
The new restrictions require residents to curb their water consumption to 13 gallons a day. CNN reports that only a month ago, “level 6 restrictions had placed residents on a daily allowance of 23 gallons, illustrating the severity of the looming catastrophe. For contrast, Americans use 80-100 gallons per person per day. CNN further notes that there is now rising turmoil over bottled water which is becoming scarce in stores in a city that is slowly beginning to panic.
"It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards Day Zero," the mayor's office said in January. "We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We must force them."
Capetonians immediately felt the latest measures take effect Thursday. Uyanda Precious Purple Mchunu lives in Long Street in the heart of Cape Town. She told CNN she woke up with no water in her apartment and was late to work. "We got no update about not having water at all. I woke up at 5:00 a.m (10:00 p.m. ET Wednesday) to shower and (not a) drop came out. I am very upset about the situation," she said. "I feel like I need to get 20 liters so I can store water. But guess what: we don't even have a schedule in terms of when will water come and when will it be off so we can be prepared. Nothing."Too many media outlets are reporting on the water crisis in S. Africa, but they are not making the connection to climate change impacts, and their connection to humanitarian disasters.
With key reservoirs standing at precariously low levels, the city forecasts that this so-called Day Zero will happen on April 12, 2018, though the exact date will depend on the weather and on consumption patterns in the coming months. The rainy season normally runs from May to September. Cape Town’s six major reservoirs can collectively store 898,000 megaliters (230 billion gallons) of water, but they held just 26 percent of that amount as of January 29, 2018. Theewaterskloof Dam—the largest reservoir and the source of roughly half of the city’s water—is in the worst condition, with the water level at just 13 percent of capacity. In practical terms, the amount of available water is even less than this number suggests because the last 10 percent of water in a reservoir is difficult to use. According to Cape Town’s disaster plan, Day Zero will happen when the system’s stored water drops to 13.5 percent of capacity. At that point, the water that remains will go to hospitals and certain settlements that rely on communal taps. Most people in the city will be left without tap water for drinking, bathing, or other uses.Patrick Bond is professor of Political Economy at Wits University in South Africa, and author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis from Above, Movement from Below, and co-editor of BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique. Sharmini Peries of the True News Network in her interview of Bond provides a compelling case on the rising fury of the Resistance to climate change in S Africa.
SHARMINI PERIES: Patrick, you mentioned this earlier. The people that are going to be most affected by this crisis. So, describe the class nature of the crisis and what we can expect as the problem deepens.
PATRICK BOND: Along with Johannesburg, which is the widely acknowledged by UN-Habitat and researchers, the most unequal city in the world here. Cape Town's in the top five, Durban as well in the top 10. These three cities, these South African cities, have had exceptional urban resistance from shack settlements and townships and low-income suburbs, from women, from environmentalists, and from labor. The South African working class, according to the World Economic Forum is considered the most militant in the world, and we have the most corrupt capitalist class in the world, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank regularly acknowledges it's the most unequal country in the world. This is an explosive situation. The question is: Will there be a possibility to bring environmental justice into a sort of maybe even eco-socialist approach to addressing this?
We've seen just one indication in Cape Town that's been quite explosive, and that's the use of shit. I know shitstorms and shit houses and shitholes are regularly discussed in the United States, but in Cape Town, shit has been used by people in the townships, Khayelitsha specifically, as a weapon of the weak, because there aren't flush toilets in these sites. There are chemical toilets and various kinds of pit latrines, and that gives the poor people the ability to take their buckets, their large plastic containers, and use those as weapons. We've begun to see a class struggle take place over water, or specifically the lack of water.
I want to share one more excerpt from the interview, but please read, or watch, the whole interview. It is a startling peek into humanity’s future of living life with barely enough water to survive.
SHARMINI PERIES: Alright.
Now, I did say that was the last question, but I cannot let you go without asking you this. This drought condition that South Africa faces is really a much bigger sub-Saharan African issue if we look at the current map that Princeton University African Flood and Drought Monitor has provided us. That there are droughts going on all over the sub-Saharan African part of the world. Tell us a little bit more about that link.
PATRICK BOND: I would also add North Africa, which is going to certainly experience the sort of 40 degree Celsius conditions regularly, and maybe the Qatar World Cup in the least, won't even happen in 2022, because the climate will have advanced rapidly. So, North Africa's the most threatened, but yes. The East African zones, particular in the horn of Kenya, running up through Somalia, have had terrible ongoing droughts. Water wars on the Nile with new dams that Ethiopia and Egypt are contesting, and in West Africa and Central Africa where we were seeing terrible civil wars ... Your viewers will know about the DRC in Sierra Leone and Northern Uganda, South Sudan, and these war sites are also the sites that are -- Darfur maybe most spectacularly -- where climate change has had an impact on the way in which desperation of herders and farmers lead to these conflicts.
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