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If Day Zero arrives, expect serious unrest as people fight for water. Ratings agency Moody’s, warning of a possible credit downgrade, said that, given the city’s marked income inequality, the water crisis posed a possible threat to social order. It’s going to get ugly, fast. How did it get to this? While there is plenty of blame to go around, here are two interconnected underlying causes.

Israeli technology could have helped make a difference but the government effectively boycotts Israel

The Western Cape is the only South African province not controlled by the African National Congress, the national governing party since apartheid’s demise in 1994. The Western Cape is governed by the Democratic Alliance, a liberal opposition party whose base is mainly made up of liberal whites, the so-called “Cape Coloured” ethnic group, and urban, educated blacks disillusioned with the ANC’s epic corruption and mismanagement. This irks the ANC to no end. The national government has been playing politics with water, hoping it might lead to the DA’s downfall if the party is seen to have mismanaged the water issue on its watch. However the water-supply infrastructure is a national government obligation, not a provincial one. The ANC government, focused obsessively on its own retention of power, has done almost nothing to plan for critical new water infrastructure for Cape Town.

The other related key factor has been the ANC’s dogged espousal of political ideology over pragmatic governance. Two years ago, when it could still have made a difference, an international conference on South Africa’s water crisis, organized in Johannesburg by South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, was cancelled due to political pressure. Israel’s then ambassador to South Africa was to have participated, Israel being a global leader in water conservation, recycling and irrigation, offering cutting-edge desalination technology. The South African wing of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement gloated at this cancellation, saying, “the rug has been pulled from the Israeli ambassador, who will not be able to exploit our very serious water crises for his own cheap publicity and whitewashing of his regime.”