The reckoning: Who owns our pula?

*JAMES G WORKMAN | Wednesday December 22, 2010 00:00

For more than 30 000 years Bushmen have lived in the Kalahari Desert.  For more than eight years the Republic of Botswana has tried to force them out.  These days, under a quiet stalemate of forced dehydration, the government has declared Bushmen can no longer dig for or carry their own water in what the High Court in Lobatse has recognised as their own homeland.

As someone who has lived for years in both Botswana and equally arid California, I can say that this seemingly obscure policy has profound global implications for the coming dry years ahead.  Going far beyond the issue of indigenous rights, the official ruling sets a precedent for thirsty people in all modern democracies because it raises uneasy questions about individual liberty and limited government, namely: Whose water is it, anyway?

Water is humanity's deepest political bond.  Citizens of any sovereign nation differ by age, class, race, gender, tribe, religion, or party.  But we all are all, quite literally, connected to each other through a vertically integrated water system that links national rivers to our household meters, and taps.  From Roman aqueducts to modern canals, water unites us.

Conversely, water shortages divide us.  Scarcity breeds social distrust, turns neighbors into rivals, and undermines political security in any society, rich or poor.

In Botswana, Africa's oldest democracy has earned a pristine reputation for transparent governance and fiscal austerity; it had never waged war, foreign or domestic.  But as national thirst escalated through years of protracted drought, elected officials deployed water to besiege and persecute people who chose a life and home against state wishes.

First the ruling Botswana Democratic Party blocked water tankers, welded shut the Bushmen's only well, and poured out their water into the sands.  Eventually officials shot at and arrested men and children ferrying water to their families.  Then it blocked wives and mothers from gathering moisture embedded in food.  Now this policy of what foreigners might call state-sponsored thirst has been officially cemented in place.  Outraged Europeans and Americans may ask what makes a clean responsible, transparent, well governed democracy deny water to its own people. But they may not like the answer.

Americans enjoy Kalahari eco-safaris with swimming pools. Europeans eat filet mignon fattened up on Kalahari cattle posts.   We all buy De Beers diamonds extracted from beneath Kalahari sands.  Botswana's three core exports - tourism, beef and carats - are prodigiously lucrative, but they are also prodigiously thirsty.  They generate billions in foreign exchange for the government, which lets it ensure a per capita income of $5,900.  The only price for growth, it seems, is that parched individuals surrender their liberty.

I'm biased, of course.  I reported Botswana's water restrictions and for doing so was, with 16 others, blacklisted from the country.  At the same time I deeply respect Botswana's people and stand behind their sovereign quest for self-determination in the face of boycotts and foreign sanctions.

So now comes a reckoning on the rain, or pula. Citizens of Botswana must choose whether the highest use of the water that unites them is reserved for foreign exports or their own compatriots.  The question boils down to: Whose water is it, anyway?

This is an important issue for humanity. Right now a third of the world lives in water-stressed countries.  As water supplies vanish under rising heat and growth, voters will have to decide who controls the water that unites us.

Indeed, in my own state of California, the world's eighth largest economy, fresh waters is also constitutionally reserved for tourism, farm, livestock, and mineral exports.  Rain harvesting is illegal in many states.  Our top-down water works are mini-monopolies that unilaterally decide who consumes how much rent-controlled water at which rates for what uses. Like Botswana, they restrict or ration or fine us - and encourage neighbors to snitch on us - if we sprinkle gardens on wrong days, flush toilets too often, plant lawns too big, or are served water in restaurants without asking.

To this day I have no legal standing over my tap. Last year Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger 'terminated' a bill (1242) that would have secured my individual right to water. Like Botswana, the US also recently 'abstained' from a UN resolution on the human right to water.

If a ruling party can control every drop moving over, under and through our landscape, then it can do whatever it pleases with it.  Citizens must, like Bushmen, submit to decisions ostensibly for the 'greater common good.'  Yet as Botswana and California have shown, the power to deny a right to water is the power to deny a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Democracy means reclaiming our most precious natural resource from state-run, rent-controlled, top-down water monopolies.  It means telling our government officials: enough.  We, the people, own our clouds. We shall secure our water foremost for all free individual citizens on an egalitarian basis.

Five years ago Botswana and the Bushmen declared a 24-hour truce in their ongoing conflict.  On Christmas Day the BDP allowed friends and extended family members to re-enter the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and bury Qoroxloo Duxee.    Duxee died after several days in the desert, alone and besieged, refusing to depart her home and refusing to compete with her family for a dwindling supply of food and moisture.

For the sake of liberty, she gave her life. To honor her life, we should work to bring hydro-democracy to the US and to Botswana.  But we should remember that owning the rain, or pula, is not something that can be handed out from above as a privilege; it must be reclaimed from below, as a responsibility and a right.

* James G Workman is co-founder of SmartMarkets, LLC, and author of the award-winning narrative nonfiction book Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought.