Posted to the web on: 02 December 2008

What Turton’s gagging has brought to surface for

SA
Mike Muller

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.