The irony surely was not lost on visitors to Grahamstown for the Science Festival that there were widespread water outages during national water week.
The irony surely was not lost on visitors to Grahamstown for the Science Festival that there were widespread water outages during national water week.
This was bad enough.
The uncollected black bags disgorging their contents provided added insult to the citizens of a city that is beginning to look a bit ragged around the edges.
Both raise questions of accountability, and of our future prosperity.
What outraged many was not only the inability to bath or flush the toilet, but also the absence of an official explanation of the water and rubbish problems.
While I was writing this, I checked the Makana Municipality website and found there was still no information on what the municipality is doing about the outages or the rubbish collection.
Rhodes University has expressed its own frustrations about a lack of communication in a document on its website.
According to the document, the university is even considering building its own water reservoir to insulate the campus from the effects of water outages, at a cost of R65 million, rather than send students home as Northwest University had to resort to doing in February.
The university has even tried to bring the issue of frequent water outages to the attention of the Minister of Economic Planning.
Latest news is that the crisis has brought together the university, Correctional Services, the Army base, Temba Hospital, and the police to try to rescue the situation.
This is welcome, but if the university up to now has not been able to impress on the municipality the importance of a long-term solution, then I fear for Grahamstown’s future.
That Rhodes can think of spending R65m is a sign of the university’s desperation.
The money could be used for more lecture theatres, maintenance of existing buildings, and whatever else can make the broader university experience fruitful, an art gallery perhaps.
Instead it is spent on doing what the municipality should be doing, which is to ensure a reliable supply of water.
At an individual level, the crisis has made homeowners look at putting in water tanks to collect rainwater, not in itself a bad thing but a diversion of cash from other purposes.
Such crises encourage the desire to be self-sufficient.
The electricity crisis induced by Eskom's bad planning has spurred those with money to look at solar panels and solar water heating to reduce dependence on a power supply that also promises to be erratic for some time.
Many of us have gas bottles and LED lamps for backup. But there is a limit to what we can and should privatise.
At the heart of the concept of Ubuntu is the idea of our societal being. Rugged individualism and self-reliance can only take you so far.
The problem with paying for what should be publicly provided is that it exacerbates the inequalities in the society, and frays the social fabric.
In the dystopian future portrayed in the 1980s Hollywood action film Robocop, the police service is privatised.
I thought this fanciful when I saw the film, but it is a reality in South Africa.
The de facto privatisation of policing is most evident in Grahamstown, where calling the armed response company is the first resort.
The pressing question is what can be done about it. Descriptions of the causes of the most recent problem focus on the technical problems of dealing with “ageing infrastructure” and misadventure.
The municipality has also highlighted illegal connections by farmers as part of the water problem.
I sympathise, but in a sense I'm not that interested in technical explanations, just as I am not that interested in the technical problems that prevent me getting a decent cell signal.
If I’m not happy I’ll simply switch to another cellular service provider. I can’t do that with water.
There is really no other way of ensuring basic services, for all, not merely the wealthier members of our community, than holding the municipality to account for its lack of progress on maintenance and repair of infrastructure and its general slackness on services.
For instance, the centre of the city and surrounds look shabby.
In places roads are poorly surfaced, with patched potholes; pavements are uneven and manhole covers are missing; some buildings are run down to the point of condemnation; and uncollected or discarded rubbish and illegal dumping is encountered frequently.
Festival visitors are sometimes shocked at the state of what should be a charming village.
How is Grahamstown to continue to attract students, academic staff, and visitors if the experience of living in a fairly isolated area is also physically uncomfortable and visually unpleasant?
Imagine the effect on visitor numbers, and the economy of the city, if the recent widespread and persistent water outages and rubbish collector strike had happened during the National Arts Festival.
