ETCETERA II

SANDY GRANT | Monday August 26, 2013 00:00

It was obvious from its excellent editorial last Friday on the seriousness of our water situation that Mmegi had taken careful note of Professor Grynberg's hard-hitting article the previous week. It expressed its own conviction that, 'more and more Batswana are beginning to accept that we are more water-challenged than ever'. Perhaps so. But personally I doubt that we have come anywhere near to grasping the realities of our water situation not least because to date the government itself has flinched from telling us the truth. On the one hand, it may be unwilling to do so for obvious political reasons. On the other it may genuinely believe that it can crack the problem by piping water from Chobe and Lesotho.

Helpfully, however, Professor Roman Grynberg, who is not similarly constrained has now warned us of the hardships inevitably ahead and that the WUC would be fully justified if it increased its tariffs by 60 percent. There are however, a number of comments in his article that need to be further explored.  Firstly, Professor Grynberg maintains that the management and Board of the WUC have shown a willingness to explain the situation and what needs to be done. Ideally, this is what should be happening but I, personally, am unaware that it is doing anything of the kind.  Secondly he states that the government will spend P7 billion rehabilitating the reticulation systems in most of the major centres which are reported to be antiquated and dilapidated. These systems were put in place in, I believe, the 1970-90 period. Are we now to understand that Water Affairs, which had responsibility for them, failed either to maintain them or to prepare plans for their phased upgrading?  In other words, everyone, from top to bottom, who was involved during those years, did almost everything wrong - that is the planners, the District Councils and the local government technicians. To be asked to take such a scenario on board is to receive a most monumental kick in the guts. 

But isn't this the unavoidable implication? It would seem that we have already endured enough humiliation with the monumental blunders of recent years - the SSK terminal building, the collapsing school buildings, the sports stadiums and so on.  Now we are also expected to grasp that the massive incompetence that we are now experiencing is not a recent phenomenon, it is one which characterised a much earlier period when, we had believed, there was more competence and more integrity. To have to bite this new bullet is very hard. Thirdly - Professor Grynberg reports, for those who understand such figures, that water brought south by the Zambezi pipeline will cost at delivery, P22/cum and adds by way of explanation that, 'water cannot and should not be cheap'.

Quite so. But two points immediately arise. If it won't be cheap, how expensive will it be? More than petrol and diesel, perhaps - which should convince us that foreign investors will not be coming here in droves? But then the WUC Management and Board ought surely to be making strenuous efforts to convince us that its dismal record with the north-south carrier should be put aside as irrelevant when it comes to the two much longer proposed pipelines.  Lesotho would be daft if it is offering free water to this country or whoever wants it.  Indeed, all water should be regarded as a commodity with a commercial value and the user, if extracting from, say, the Zambezi, should be obligated to pay into a common inter-national pool. But what are the anticipated costs of piping water from Lesotho given, not least, that community and privately owned areas would need to be heavily compensated? Bluntly, I really do not understand why SADC, with its supposed regional perspective, would go along with this country's plans to bring water from its source, at an outrageous cost, in order that its past patterns of development can be unsustainably continued? 

Where the real cost of water is over the moon, there should be no water- dependent industries and, with today's water guzzling techniques, only minimal building.  In the recent past this country has been able to exist in a sort of dreamland where everything it needed was easily available.

If   SADC had sense, it would be advising its member states to focus their development efforts on those places and countries which do have water. And to advise those that don't, such as this country, to work out new strategies which are sustainable and therefore appropriate to their geographical and environmental situation. And to dump those that are not.  And lastly, notes Professor Grynberg; 'if the government is looking for a place to help business by lowering the cost of utilities, the logical place would be through the electricity price because we have abundant supplies of coal.' Here I get totally lost because Professor Grynberg has previously explained that extracting coal requires huge amounts of water. If water is expensive, coal will also be expensive and so indeed will be electricity. A nasty equation.