Shadow of a Drought: Notes from Cape Town’s Water Crisis

Abstract

This essay reflects on the water crisis experienced by the Cape Town metropolitan area in 2016 and 2017. It explores how the question of access to water is implicated in the city’s colonial and apartheid history, and then considers how the spectre of “Day Zero” (the day when the taps would, supposedly, run dry) was invoked in political debates and the media.

KEYWORDS:

• Cape Town
• day zero
• infrastructure
• South Africa
• water crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Aghoghovwia explains in this issue, in South Africa “citizens/individuals pay their utilities’ rates and taxes to the municipal government, which in turn pays to the utilities companies that deliver these essential services.” In the case of Cape Town, water tariffs have remained the same since 2017, and have not been reduced to pre-drought levels, even after several years of good rains. The City of Cape Town argues that this is partly because some 40 per cent of households in the metro (classed as low-income or “indigent”) do not pay any water tariffs at all. And so the variable rates for water usage across the city are also in effect a form of ‘cross-subsidisation’, whereby more affluent parts of the city make up the shortfall, and redress a historical lack of investment in water infrastructure. See Jones, (2018) and Petersen, (2021).