Katse Dam in Lesotho is a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem written in concrete.
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
It is, admittedly, an impressive sight, with its 185m-high wall whose deep, efficient reservoir holds back 2-billion cubic metres of water, much of which will eventually flow through Gauteng’s taps … if it gets there.
It’s unlikely President Cyril Ramaphosa had Shelley’s sonnets on his mind as he travelled to the mountain kingdom this week to open the R2.4bn Senqu Bridge.
The latest of the Lesotho Highland Water Project’s works, it has been built to replace the existing bridge that will disappear under the waters of the new Polihali Dam once they are impounded.
The scheme that supplies South Africa’s economic heartland with water is mighty indeed, but also, as water expert Anthony Turton has consistently pointed out, deeply flawed.
Their water is pumped 100km, uphill, from the shallow, sunstruck Vaal dam, relying on the delusion that there will always be cheap, reliable electricity to run the pumps, and that the pipes won’t break
Set aside for a moment the fact that the water for Gauteng comes from a neighbouring country that we once invaded in a ham-fisted military operation named Boleas.
Joburg and Pretoria are two of the only major cities in the world not built on a river, a lake or the ocean. Their water is pumped 100km, uphill, from the shallow, sunstruck Vaal Dam, relying on the delusion that there will always be cheap, reliable electricity to run the pumps, and that the pipes won’t break.
Depending on how the figures are parsed, the bill to fix Joburg’s creaking water infrastructure runs between R27bn and R64bn (and good luck to whichever administration inherits this albatross on the promise of repairing it).
If the water from Lesotho’s dams had its own poetry, it would, given the situation in Gauteng, be less English Romantic and more brutalist realism. With apologies to Robert Frost: “The lakes are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I leak.”
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