BOKAMOSO
Drought: Rise, Cape Town, rise!
Day Zero has moved from a possibility to a probability. But it is not yet inevitable. The Cape drought crisis has triggered heated emotions and a lot of disagreement about who is to blame. But one thing we can agree on: we have to avoid Day Zero. And another thing we must accept: the only way to defeat Day Zero is to use less water.
When descending too rapidly with a faulty parachute, the sense of looming disaster is not pleasant, but it is nothing when compared to the actual experience of hitting the ground. The inconvenience of getting by on 50 litres a day is nothing compared to a water system switched off altogether.
So everyone affected has to make the changes necessary to get down to 50 litres per day. If we achieve 50 litres per day from 1 February (but don’t wait, start now) then we can push out Day Zero far enough that our water augmentation projects (which should start supplying 120 million litres additional water by May 2018) and (hopefully) some winter rainfall will offer some relief. If we cannot achieve this, then the taps will be turned off on Day Zero, currently calculated to be 12 April – just 76 days from now
We can still avoid this massive systemic disruption to our lives, but it means each one of us accepting that there is no way around this tough but doable water restriction. We can choose to be defeated, or we can choose to show the world that we are up to the challenge.