Dr Water Crisis is seriously weird

Everyone is springing to the defence of Anthony Turton, the scientist suspended by the CSIR for his paper detailing the impending crisis in SA’s water supply. It makes grim reading. You will quickly understand why the CSIR tried to shut him up – and it’s got nothing to do with water.

His paper is a mix of science and some really bizarre rantings about our collective past. If I try to unpack the tangled history lesson Turton provides, I think his message is that the “most insidious” thing about our water situation is the propensity of (black) people to ethnic cleansing and terrible violence when they don’t get service delivery (illustrated with pictures)

I quote at length below from his report because I’m sure most people have not read it; it beggars belief that serious science should be cooked in such a stew of political and historical weirdness. Read it and make up your own mind …

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(You can read the full report here
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Driver no. 3: historic legacy. The most insidious, but potentially more volatile of these fundamental drivers, is our historic legacy. In this regard the country we call South Africa was forged out of the extreme violence of the Second Anglo-Boer War (Mills & Williams, 2006; Turton et al., 2006).

This was an event so traumatic that it sowed the seeds of the subsequent quest for Afrikaner Nationalism as a vehicle for recovery of a nation smashed, not on the field of battle, but by the gross injustice of the Scorched Earth Policy that targeted non-combatants and the resultant squalor of the British concentration camps in which Africans, women and children died of dysentery, cholera, starvation and despair (Hasian, 2003; Hobhouse, 1901; 1907; Van Reenen, 2000; Van Rensburg, 1980). The social pathology caused by this one historic event, which gave birth to our country as a legal entity, merged with three other sets of significant social trauma from the pre-statehood era, the combined effects of which are still being felt today:

the plight of the amaXhosa after a century of war, which culminated in the Great Cattle Killing that reduced that great nation after 1857 to wage earners unable to sustain themselves (Meer, 1990; Peires, 2003; Welsh, 2000);

the ethnic cleansing in the 1820s and 1830s of many non-Zulu tribes during the Mfecane that laid the hinterland of the country waste, creating the vacuum into which the Trek Boers moved during the Great Trek (Edgecombe, 1986;Turton et al., 2004; Welsh, 2000);

and the destruction of the amaZulu as a hegemonic nation at the Battle of Ulundi, in response to their defeat of the British at the epic Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 (Mills & Williams, 2006; Welsh, 2000).

The combined effect of these four events has created a historic legacy that is based on violence and the disrespect of human rights that still lives with us today. These historic events have given us a country without a coherent sense of nationhood (Buzan, 1991; Thompson & Lamar, 1981). Our science is embedded in this legacy, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. In the context of the topic at hand, this means that all decisions taken at a strategic level need to be fully cognisant of three vitally important consequences of our historic legacy.

The propensity to resort to mass violence when expectations exceed the capacity of the government to deliver

The legacy that has left a country with no coherent sense of nationhood, prone to popular rhetoric that reflects crudely defined racial stereotypes, a manifestation of which is a majority of citizens who are mired in endemic poverty, with little prospect of escaping that trap, without massive government planning and support.

The systematic erosion of investor confidence, punctuated by bouts of extreme violence such as the recent xenophobic attacks (see Image 1b), which cause great harm to the perception of the international financial community that South Africa is a viable destination for foreign direct investment …