The real State of the Nation lies underground in broken sewerage and water pipes

In his June 2019 State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa presented a Chinese-inspired futuristic vision of 21st-century South African “smart cities”. The speech generated much criticism among those who felt this was a pipe dream, and that there were more urgent needs to repair and maintain the broken basic infrastructures of water, sanitation, energy, public transport, schools, hospitals, and so on.

Eskom’s ongoing meltdown and the dire state of SOEs and other public entities devastated by State Capture, indicated that state institutions throughout the country were on life support. Silicon Valley visions of smart cities and cutting-edge technologies seemed out of touch, a distraction from the mammoth task of fixing broken infrastructures and public institutions.

Drawing on the concept of “broken world thinking”, the IT scholar Steven J Jackson also criticises this global obsession with newfangled technologies coming out of high tech design laboratories. This private-sector driven fetishisation of innovation is taking place at a time when neoliberal governments are neglecting, and sometimes selling off, public infrastructures and utilities.

Whereas the privatisation of public utilities is indeed a problem in many parts of the world, in South Africa the more serious problem is the failure of the state to properly manage the outsourcing of public projects and services to private firms. There appears to be insufficient capacity to monitor outsourced state projects and this has led to a culture of tenderpreneurship and the kinds of crises we see in Eskom and SOEs as well as the breakdown of municipal infrastructure and services throughout the country.

According to the journalist Sue Segar, the collapse of water and sanitation infrastructure has happened in hundreds of municipalities. For instance, about 80% of the country’s 825 municipal sewage treatment works are currently broken and dysfunctional. Similarly, Dr Gideon Groenewald, a water engineer and borehole expert with Gift of the Givers, told me that he drives more than 8,000km a month across the country seeking to find solutions for towns that have run out of water due to a combination of drought and broken water systems.

Why, then, is the water and sanitation crisis not taken more seriously as a matter of national political concern? Could it be because in South Africa, political and economic elites typically do not suffer the effects of broken water and sanitation infrastructure? For the middle classes in the wealthier cities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg, the ongoing water and sanitation crises in many parts of the country are barely noticed. Yet, when load shedding impacts upon them, it miraculously morphs into a national crisis that is accorded top priority by government.

It would seem that infrastructures are typically in the background and invisible - until they break down. For instance, with the recent loss of internet access, many South Africans learnt about the vulnerability of undersea cables to seismic activity and turbulent ocean currents. Prior to this temporary internet breakdown, there was no need to know anything about these unseen, underwater cables.

The same could be said about the everyday infrastructures that we rely upon for our water, sanitation and energy needs. For the middle classes in the affluent suburbs, electricity, water and sewerage usually works seamlessly, without any need to pay attention to how any of these infrastructures actually work. Should the street lights go off, or the refuse not be collected, a phone call or email to the local councillor or ratepayers' association is usually enough to get the problem solved.

The same cannot be said about the experiences of the poor, who typically have to endure constantly breaking basic infrastructure, usually with very slow and ineffective responses from local authorities.

It was for the above reasons that the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) was established in 2008 in an informal settlement called RR Section in Khayelitsha. This rights-based social movement sought to render visible to political and economic elites the daily realities of infrastructural breakdown. The SJC sought to make the crisis of broken sanitation infrastructure in Cape Town’s informal settlements politically legible by means of social audit reports that systematically documented the state of disrepair and dysfunctionality of toilets and sewerage infrastructure. The organisation also lobbied, pressured, blamed and shamed the City of Cape Town into funding a janitor programme to monitor and repair this infrastructure.

While SJC has had many successes, its focus has largely been limited to rolling out and fixing toilets and sewerage pipes, omitting other vital infrastructures concerned with drainage, stormwater management and so on.

As the University of Cape Town’s Future Water Institute researchers Kirsty Carden and Amber Abrams note, even with access to toilets and sewerage infrastructure, residents in many informal settlements face serious health hazards because of poor or non-existent drainage infrastructure that results in stagnant pools of contaminated grey water that children play in, and often end up with severe cases of diarrhoea.

Another dimension of infrastructure that most Capetonians seemed to have been oblivious to is water supply. For instance, prior to the onset of the “Day Zero” crisis, most Capetonians, including myself, had no idea where the city’s key dams were located. Like the middle classes elsewhere in the world, all we have to do is turn on the tap for potable water to flow. When it comes to sanitation, we simply flush the toilet and our waste is washed away, out of sight and out of mind, flowing seamlessly through underground pipes to sewage plants and then out to the sea. Day Zero changed all of this, and many ordinary citizens learnt about technical matters relating to dams, sewerage systems, desalination plants, underground water and aquifers.

Yet, once the crisis seemed to be over, water and its infrastructures once again receded into the background. So, what does all of this tell us about possibilities for a politics of infrastructure in South Africa?

Supporters of the Unemployed Peoples’ Movement (UPM) celebrating their court victory outside the Grahamstown High Court, 14 January 2020. (Photo: supplied)

KwaZakhele’s Saltuba co-operative members meet under the shade of the solar panel whose electricity they plan to sell to the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality. (Photo: supplied)