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South Africa: What Turton's Gagging Has Brought to Surface

Mike Muller

2 December 2008

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opinion

Johannesburg — FLOOD and drought, typhoid and cholera are essential tools for water engineers to get attention from their societies. So the declaration of a water crisis by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR's) Anthony Turton can only help the government's beleaguered water managers.

But the controversy over Turton's suspension raises important issues that flow beyond water and raises questions about SA's approach to its "development".

Turton is a political scientist, not a water expert, although he has worked on water as a political issue at both community and international levels. And to understand the controversy that he has raised, we should read his paper as political science.

As he acknowledges, his warnings about the technical challenges in water are not new. The problems caused by badly managed municipalities that dump sewage in our rivers; the pressures we face as populations grow and economic development generates more waste; the pollution from abandoned mines -- all these and more were addressed in parliamentary presentations by the country's two pre-eminent water institutions, the South African Institution of Civil Engineering and the Water Institute of Southern Africa, just a few weeks before.

The suggestion that there is not enough money for water research is misleading and self-serving. The Water Research Commission disburses nearly R100m a year for water research against priorities set by the commission together with the government and users. The CSIR gets a sizable chunk but, correctly, not everything it wants.

Other statements in Turton's paper are frankly wrong. To support the claim that SA is on an "Uhuru decade" path, living off its dwindling inheritance, Turton claims that water sector "infrastructure was particularly robust so it has lasted a decade and a half, but it is now clearly under pressure and if left alone will collapse piece by piece, in the midterm future. The trend in infrastructure investment for water at the national level shows this prognosis to be probable in a startling way."

The alarming graph he uses to "prove" this is of investment undertaken directly by the water affairs department. That does peak in the 1980s, with the Orange River projects. But after the 1980s, most investment was undertaken by other agencies. So two Lesotho Highlands projects, as well as all subsequent investments by water boards and municipalities, are omitted. But then Turton is a political scientist not an economist or water scientist.

But the real controversy was not over water. It was the suggestion, illustrated with graphic images of xenophobic violence, that water service failures lead to civil unrest and violence because SA has "a historic legacy that is based on violence and the disrespect of human rights that still lives with us today". "These historic events (the Great Cattle Killing, the Mfecane, the defeat of the amaZulu at Ulundi)", says Turton, "have given us a country without a coherent sense of nationhood. Our science is embedded in this legacy, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not".

The notion of water as a security problem is not new. It is a language emanating from the US, which from the late 1980s began to look at water conflicts as a dominant security threat of the future. The colonels in the National Security Council found unlikely allies among environmentalists who saw opportunities to command attention and resources.

This language was understood by the securocrats of SA's own State Security Council, who monitored service delivery issues as part of their total strategy. Turton worked for these structures, and it shows in his writing today.

So, in the late 1990s, papers probably authored by Turton did emerge from SA's intelligence structures suggesting that water would cause future conflicts in southern Africa. But the thesis was not accepted and SA's and southern Africa's vision of water as a source of co-operation rather than conflict has been generally accepted globally, not least because it is strongly supported by empirical evidence.

Domestically, there has been violence in relation to local government issues -- well illustrated by the recent concerted campaigns that have put the re-incorporation of Merafong into Gauteng now firmly on the agenda. But it is suggested by political scientists such as Wits University's Susan Booysen that the adoption of "brick or ballot" was a deliberate tactic.

"Contrary to public expectations that the protests were signals of a systematic revolt against the ruling African National Congress ... protest and voting were rated equally as mechanisms to attain improved levels of service delivery," she writes. "The grass roots were involved in a multifaceted series of direct engagements with their party to simultaneously keep it in power but also pressure it for advances in service delivery."

This is normal politics, not the Afro-pessimist securocrat nightmare of primal African hordes that Turton would have us inhabit.

But if our development, of water and other public services, is not driven by a "total strategy" approach, what are our models of the development process?

Some would like to see constitutional law drive development. The Wits University's Centre for Applied Legal Studies recently accused the government of reducing the resources municipalities have to address water; also of disregarding the needs of the poor by devolving the water function to municipalities. Both statements are incorrect and the idea that water supply and sanitation or other services can be achieved using a "rights-based" approach has not been particularly successful. Indeed, the death in her shack of Irene Grootboom, famous in advocacy literature for her "victory" on housing rights, was a nail in the coffin for the notion of rights-based development in SA.

Another favourite model is that of the predatory state, in which the dependent capitalist compradors and their carpetbagger allies sell out their compatriots for personal gain. While there are plenty of anecdotal examples of this behaviour, the model does not yet hold, given the evidence of the massive transfers to the poor from SA's public purse. However, we fit equally poorly the East Asian developmental state model, with patronage rather than competence often taking precedence in our public service.

Boringly, SA looks increasingly like many other messy democracies, driven by "normal politics" with different groups trying to gain power and, through it, resources, in contests with others.

Where we remain special is around our attitude to the once dominant minority and, on a related but separate matter, to the skills that were once the monopoly of that minority but are now increasingly broadly shared. We do not yet have a discourse to describe how skills, black and white, can and should be used in SA.

Researcher Karl von Holdt has recently described the ambivalence towards skills in the health sector. They are accepted as key to "delivery" but there is reticence because they confer undue influence and opportunity on both old and new elites -- often, he could have added, at the expense of the comprador class.

So in our world of normal politics, with development driven by the usual pressures from interest groups rich and poor, we have yet to agree on the value of intellectual attainment, formal education and specific experience and how to manage the advantages they bring. The water debate should help us to focus.

Globally, the message is that there is no water crisis, simply a crisis of water management. That is the message that needs to be drawn from the Turton debacle.

Muller is a visiting professor at the Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management.

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