• VICTORIA TUWILIKA SHIFIDITHE one-sided global debate on climate change has indirectly crippled critical thinking and service delivery across many sectors.
In 2006, a former UK secretary of state compared climate change sceptics to terrorists, who should be censored. Several others have labelled climate change sceptics as a threat to humanity, who should be tried before the courts.
Calls to dominate discussions with climate change advocates as opposed to sceptics have been made. The culture of not critically questioning climate change has been promoted. As a result, the wider public has been conditioned to create a huge backlash at sceptics.
While taking cognisance of the pressure exerted on water resources by climate change, our current water crisis seems to emanate more from poor management. Climate change has overshadowed the real cause of the water crisis, such as social demographics, land use, governance, lack of proactiveness, ignorance, as well as lack of community participation.
Climate change excuses in cases where situations could have been prevented have become unquestionable reasons for a lack of service delivery, and communities are fed only with this one-sided and biased notion, which they accept with no qualms.
We have seemingly taken advantage of the climate change concept in our attempt to condition the audience and steer the current water crisis discussion around physical water scarcity, as opposed to economic water scarcity. As much as Namibia is a dry country – its major rivers are shared, and rainfall highly unpredictable – we have always known these facts, and they should no longer be the departure point for discussion.
Hydrological data reveals that dry years worse than the current ones were recorded before, and current droughts seem to be a result of normal climate patterns. We, however, seem to manage our water resources in the same manner we did when our population was barely a million.
Generally, we should have known water deficits will worsen with pressure exerted by the wet industry too. But nonetheless, we did less than necessary to avert the well-foreseen crisis. We have subconsciously slipped into an era of absolute complacency, an era in which climate change gets the blame for anything we fail to manage. The overall goal should be to deliver services in the first place, even in the absence of climate change.
There have been insufficient active and open platforms of engagement, while waiting on the drought, to call for urgent meetings, whose momentum lapse when it starts raining well again.
We should also ask ourselves the following questions: Are we negotiating fair allocations at the negotiating table with other co-riparian states? The Namibia Statistics Agency collects data on social demographics but how often, if at all, do we engage with such data and information to adjust our planning accordingly?
Other shortcomings include political and economic decisions to approve wet industries (such as SABMiller or the chicken farm) in the central area, despite the water sector feeling otherwise. It is also cumbersome to regulate agriculture – one of the largest users and polluters of water – if the water and agriculture departments (with competing and conflicting interests) are under the same ministry.
All these examples have nothing to do with climate change directly, but are all dependent on the decisions we make.
There is dangerous over-reliance on (global) climate models, trends that may not necessarily coincide with Namibian conditions. Models are currently being treated as a replacement for critical thinking and manpower, rather than complementary tools to assist planning. We trust models somewhat blindly without giving much attention to locally-observed data.
We ignore the fact that models are accompanied by their inherent uncertainties, which we do not seem to interpret. We forget that models’ results are just as good or bad as the input data, or the one running the model; data which we do not seem to value, and diligence we do not seem to apply. We further fail to interpret these models in the local context, providing inaccurate or no information to the public, subsequently making these models irrelevant.
Government water law is currently weak or practically non-existent, if no regulations to enforce it are urgently put in place. It has generally taken nearly a decade to rectify unimplementable sections of the Water Resources Management Act, 2004 (Act No. 24 of 2004) into the current Water Resources Management Act, 2013 (Act No. 11 of 2013). The now partly outsourced drafting of technical regulations, which have simply been tweaked from previous ones, have come along since over a decade ago, seemingly with less enthusiasm from within the sector.
As an example, we perhaps should not have a major water crisis if sources were less polluted too. Industries, tourism establishments, and individuals alike continue to pollute streams, waterways, and subsequently dams, with no repercussions whatsoever in the absence of binding regulations. Not only does water pollution reduce the available potable water, it also takes a lot of resources to purify such water later.
The Swakoppoort and Goreangab dams are some of those heavily polluted sources, which could relieve the pressure on central areas if they were properly managed.
It remains pointless in the meantime to treat the symptoms by identifying additional water sources if we will continue to manage what we have in the same manner as we have always done before.
An Ethiopian proverb stated that “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty”, reminding us just how much work we must do and how huge a paradigm shift we need concerning the water sector, to address our crisis for now and the future.
• Victoria Tuwilika Shifidi is a government hydrologist. Views expressed herein are her own.
