South African Water Acts of 1956 and 1998
In exploring the politics behind water in South Africa, my first step is to gain a foundational knowledge of the policies that dictate water provisioning. During apartheid, the South African government passed the Water Act of 1956. This act gave local governments control over the water in their areas, and the state control over any underground water stores and water works projects. In this era, governments were working against the black majority, and focused on maintaining the power and wealth of the white minority. For white people, this "implied a comfortable, privileged lifestyle—with access, for example, to reliable water supplies and the prospect of economic development and ‘progress’ in the greater part of the country (including the ‘developed’ urban areas) where they lived and worked and enjoyed social and political advantages" (Tempelhoff, 2017). As Tempelhoff describes, access to water and 'white' technologies regarding its use, like irrigation, became a tool to maintain superiority over black Africans. While the Water Act of 1956 makes few direct references to race and power dynamics, by giving the apartheid government total control of water rights, the Act all but guaranteed that White South Africans would have priority access to water. A separate issue with this act, as Schreiner touches on in her article Why Has the South African National Water Act Been so Difficult to Implement?, is the modeling of this act after legislation in Europe. European countries are comparatively water-rich, so the allocation techniques used in Europe don't translate well to water-scarce South Africa. Under this law, social inequities were exacerbated as rich white people had far greater access to water than poorer black people.
The act of 1956 was law until 1998, when South Africa passed the National Water Act (NWA) as part of a series of reforms to transition away from racialized governance. In the writing of this act, the government acknowledges the discrimination present in previous water laws, recognizing "that while water is a natural resource that belongs to all people, the discriminatory laws and practices of the past have prevented equal access to water, and use of water resources " (Republic of South Africa). The government states they have good intentions with the act, as interpreted per the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry's Guide to the National Water Act. The NWA is founded on principles of sustainability, equity and efficiency, and puts the National government as the public trustee of the nation's water source. The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry thus has "the power to regulate the use, flow and control of all water in South Africa" (Guide to the National Water Act). These powers, with the government's clear stated intentions to sustainably, equitably and efficiently provision water, should, in theory, give everyone equal access to water. Unfortunately, upon implementation the NWA has not lived up to its goals.
20 years since the passing of the NWA, water is still divided along race and socioeconomic lines. There are many categories in which this occurs, and for the end of this post I want to briefly explore catchment entitlements of farmers. Schreiner presents this as an argument against the efficacy of the NWA, stating: "During the drafting of the NWA[,] the white farming community made it very clear that they did not support the idea of the department taking water away from them without compensation to allocate to black farmers who had been disadvantaged during apartheid. They indicated clearly that this was a matter that they intended fighting all the way to the Constitutional court. That this has not yet happened may be due to the changing of positions in the past 15 years, but is more likely due to the fact that little has happened in the reallocation of water" (Schreiner, 2013). The NWA needed to not only set precedent for future water provisionment, but reassess catchment provisions that were established in the apartheid era. Smallholder farmers still have less access to water, because predominantly white, wealthy commercial farmers have retained their entitlements that they legally claimed during apartheid (Kemerink et al, 2011).
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Well presented analysis of the policy and legal framework that constitute water management in South Africa, highlighting not only the implication of power across racial divide but also expressing the inequality that underscore water governance in post-apartheid south Africa. However, what is the implicaiton of physical geography of water in production of knowledge about water in South Africa?
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