“Day Zero” in Cape Town: overcoming neo-colonialism?
In 2017-2018, Cape Town had to implement a series of water restrictions to avoid the coming of “Day Zero”. This gloomy term refers to water levels in dams falling below 13.5% of their maximum capacity, requiring the city to close all taps and impose a daily 25-litre per person rationing. The measures taken enabled to postpone the date when “Day Zero” would be reached, until water storage levels were high enough for “Day Zero” not to be a threat anymore.
If the concept of “Day Zero” may be useful for mobilizing inhabitants and public resources, it does have some drawbacks, two of which I want to explore here.
A major critique inspired by political ecology literature is that “Day Zero” is very much an apolitical narrative. It considers droughts as a pure environmental issue: the consequence of dry winters, of decreased precipitations, of climate change induced perturbation to the water cycle. But the “Day Zero” narrative conceals the responsibility of city officials who failed to plan for such droughts. During the especially wet 2013 winter, city officials decided that no further water storage measures would be needed until the 2020s. More generally, because of short-termist reelection concerns, officials were unwilling to invest in water storage at a time when water resources were still widely available.
The second critique ensues from the first one: Cape Town’s absence of planning for drought scenarios means that when crises do happen, the city is very dependent on external aid and assistance. In the case of the 2017-18 water crisis, bottled water was brought to Cape Town from other regions of South Africa to palliate to the water demand – in addition to the restrictions imposed on water consumption. Although the Cape Town water crisis was dealt with without foreign assistance, this relationship of dependence towards external actors and this passivity recalls of the dependence and passivity imposed by colonial powers on occupied territories. The concept of “Day Zero” seems to only perpetuate an agency-denying colonial thinking.
The coping mechanisms employed by Cape Town to avoid “Day Zero” received criticism for aggravating social inequalities. For example the removal of Free Basic Water – which between 2001 and 2017 granted 25 litres of water per person per day to the poorest households – led to greater commercialisation and privatisation of water.
One must however not forget that Cape Town did avoid “Day Zero” and drew lessons from the crisis. For instance, the 2018 Climate Change Bill set a framework reconsidering the scale at which environmental issues should be addressed and grants more decision-making power to local governments, mayors and municipalities. A new mindset regarding water storage also seems to emerge as in 2017 Cape Town’s executive mayor Patricia De Lille stated that “The city had accepted it was no longer feasible to just wait for the rain. It had to start preparing for the ‘new normal’ of regular water shortages because of climate change and to stop relying solely on surface water.”
These direct responses to the water crisis may be viewed as a sign that neo-colonial passive patterns are being replaced by more pro active water politics.
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