Business and training: Mike’s message
37
Lessons from late friends
Over the past couple of years, the South African water
sector has lost some good friends who had made their
mark on the world’s water community.
By Mike Muller
The latest was Piers Cross who passed away in
March. Back in 2014, John Briscoe, who was the
World Bank’s global water expert at one stage, also
passed on. Both left important legacies behind that
are worth mentioning here.
Piers was the first CEO of the Mvula Trust, which
helped to set up South Africa’s rural water supply and
sanitation programmes in the 1990s. Unlike most of the
NGOs from that period, this trust is still going strong.
One of Piers’s characteristics was that (not to put too
fine a point on it) he talked a lot of nonsense.
Now I am being quite careful and accurate here. Piers
was someone who understood that sanitation is far
more than a technical issue. If you could not talk frankly
about it with the people concerned, you would not make
much progress in persuading them to build and use
toilets. And the people concerned were the people in
the rural communities, not just in South Africa but also
across the world. (Before he came home to get Mvula
running, Piers used to run the World Bank’s Water and
Sanitation Programme.)
John Briscoe was another kind of specialist. He was
an engineering graduate from UCT who worked at the
old Department of Water Affairs for some time, and
found that he could not engage in engineering without
understanding environmental health issues.
He could talk about cholera epidemiology as
confidently as systems analysis of complex river
basins’ water resources or public finance options for
infrastructure development.
Unfortunately, like so many people, he was far more
interested in working on those big interesting issues
than in himself. So he missed the early symptoms of
colon cancer and by the time it was diagnosed, it was
too late to stop the spread of the disease.
Many of us spend a lot of time worrying about and trying
to fix other people’s problems. John was cross with
himself, as a public health specialist, for not dealing with
his own health challenges at the right time. And, while
I learnt a huge amount from him about the big picture
water issues, I also appreciate this last lesson: don’t
forget to look after yourself (and those close to you). PA
Mike Muller
Mike Muller is a visiting
adjunct professor at the
Wits University School
of Governance and a
former Commissioner
of the National Planning
Commission and Director
General of Water Affairs.
At his memorial service, Piers was remembered
as someone who shared his passion freely and
enthusiastically. This did sometimes involve talking
about what is often considered unmentionable subjects
over the dinner table, but that never stopped him.
I met him in the 1980s in Zimbabwe, where he formed
part of a World Bank team supporting rural water
supply. He was also an enthusiast for the Blair Research
Laboratory’s work on sanitation — they invented the VIP
toilet, which is still widely used in rural areas today.
Piers was not a technician — his degree was in
anthropology and that was his strength. He was more
interested in understanding how people thought and
worked rather than how their taps and toilets worked
(or, more often, did not). Many of us in the water sector
still need to work on this skill.
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
Many of us in the water
sector still need to work on
this skill.
June 2017 Volume 23 I Number 4