COMMUNITY LIVING
Steppes of Russia to the Gobi-Manchurian Steppe of Mongolia and China , the Prairies of North America , and the Pampas of South America – are vast ecosystems created by the prevailing climate . The absence of trees in such ecosystems is an artefact of the limitation of precipitation , either in the form of rainfall or as snow . More importantly , those ecosystems are economically undeveloped , with a sparse and often migratory population , typically living a subsistence lifestyle of considerable hardship .
The numbers are staggering . Of all the electricity consumed , an average municipality in South Africa uses just under 20 % of its total allocation for the treatment of water and the resultant waste flowing back into the sewers . It is therefore significant that the Crocodile West & Marico Water Management Area is the only one in the country with an increasing flow , as it channels the cumulative sewage waste out of the major urban conurbation of Johannesburg , Pretoria , East and West Rand .
South Africa bucks this trend , because about 60 % of the economic activity of the country , sustaining about 40 % of the total population , now lives in an economically diverse landscape made possible only because of the ability to pump water over vast distances , and against the whims of gravity . In fact , the South African Highveld has evolved into one of the most economically diverse areas of the world , when comparing it to other grassland biomes . It even boasts an artificial forest , entirely sustained by the energy needed to pump water uphill . This extraordinary achievement was made possible by the discovery of gold in 1886 . That event triggered engineering on a massive scale , eventually pumping water over the Drakensberg Mountains from the Tugela River in Natal , and eventually through the Maluti Mountains via tunnels large enough to house a double decker bus when the Lesotho Highlands Project was created .
The second aspect is related to planning . In the case of water resources , that function used to be the sole prerogative of the former Department of Water Affairs , but this was changed when the National Water Act and Water Services Act were both promulgated in 1997 . These two acts were the first pieces of legislation to be passed by the post-apartheid government . They were radical in their reach , because they sought to democratise planning through the creation of structures that had never existed before .
Central to these were Catchment Management Agencies ( CMAs ) and Independent Development Plans ( IDPs ) that were supposed to be aligned with the National Water Resource Strategy ( NWRS ). None of these have been successfully implemented , and the responsibility for planning fell onto the shoulders of municipal structures which had never previously performed tasks of this nature . With the absence of institutional memory , policy and procedure to guide the process , planning has generally failed . Consequently , the impact of the rapid urbanisation of the 1990s has created a permanent misalignment with existing infrastructure , without the institutional ability to selfcorrect . The result is a growing crisis of water service delivery , now exacerbated by the failing electricity infrastructure .
At the time of writing , six pylons have fallen over in Pretoria . This single incident will provide a perfect case study of the water-energy nexus in the context of inadequate planning . It is too early to report on , but watch the news for growing insight .
40 S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y
If these two aspects – geography and planning – provide the fundamental drivers of the problem , the politics of redistribution can be considered the third exacerbating factor . In this regard we can say that government tenders have become the cash cow for the distribution of patronage to supporters of the ruling party , and service delivery failure has become the unintended consequence . In the absence of clear and precise planning , tenders can be produced without any accurate benchmark against which the value proposition can be measured . We can safely conclude that the chaos arising from the lack of planning creates a rich ecosystem in which unscrupulous commercial operators can thrive .