Desperation As Drought Deepens

Vast parts of SA have run dry. What has caused the crisis and what can be done to help those most in need?

- Gabisile Ngcobo & Lesego Maja

YOU can see the desperation on their faces. As the giant water tankers roll into the Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet, residents jostle one another, frantically trying to get to the front of the queue. They know there won’t be enough water for everyone. Those who don’t get any will be forced to go thirsty or take their chances by sourcing water from a nearby drain.

For people living in the high-lying parts of the Eastern Cape town, it’s pointless opening a tap – most ran dry months ago. Nqweba Dam, which supplies the town, is empty. The ongoing drought has transformed the area’s main water supply into a festering wasteland, littered with dead fish.

Which means the town is now reliant on boreholes – and the water trucked in by government and aid organisations.

It’s a similar story in other towns in the Eastern Cape, and also in parts of the Western and Northern Cape. Dams are empty, taps have run dry, children aren’t going to school, clinics can’t help patients, cattle are dying and farmers have to retrench labourers. “It’s a disaster,” says Ali Sablay, project manager of aid organisation Gift of the Givers.

Over the past two years, his organisation has delivered around R200 million in drought relief in large areas of the northern and southern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Now, it’s the Eastern Cape’s turn.

In addition to supplying much-needed water aid to Makhanda ( formerly Grahamstown), Adelaide, Queenstown, and Ngcobo, Gift of the Givers is providing Graaff-Reinet with around 100 000 litres of bottled water per day – and it’s still not enough.

WHAT’S CAUSING THE CRISIS?

While there’s been lots of finger-pointing, accusations of gross negligence and claims of inadequate infrastructure, Sablay says you can’t blame it all on muni­cipalities.