Cape Town Water Disaster: The Self-Righteous Born Again Water Conservationists

There's a lot of self-righteous one-upmanship among many born-again conservationists about what they're doing to save water. They can't wait to boast about it in the media and social media.  For example, Helen Zille's ridiculous tweet showing a picture of her painted toenails in a bucket of water. Doesn't she have better things to do?

My family - five members and 12 pets - were water conscious long before the disaster and it became fashionable to "save". We always tried to use water sparingly, bucket washed (I and a couple of members have been doing that for a few years already) and reused grey water in the garden. Our one extravagance was watering the garden but with restrictions a year ago that was throttled back and eventually ceased. Before the unfolding disaster last year but we had constant fights with my late 91-year-old mom about her opening taps at full blast and letting it run. She'd tell us to get lost.

My point being that most of this - conservation - is common sense. When I hear or read another born again member of the public, celebrity or politician saying how little water they use and the tips they offer, I wonder why they're preaching to the converted as if they invented conservation. What were you doing before this?, I ask.

Take this #DefeatDayZero campaign. We cannot defeat it, but help prevent it happening. (What's with politicians and their war talk?) Even if we collectively reduced consumption to 450 million litres a day or less, if it doesn't rain, we can't prevent the taps running dry.
 

Some people believe Day Zero won't happen this year, not that it can't happen. It's in this vein I thought CapeTalk radio host John Maytham was supercilious, as he often is as if he's always right, of his dismissal of a caller to his show on February who said he doesn't believe in Day Zero. I understood him to mean Day Zero won't happen this year, not that it can't happen. Isn't that what the campaign is about - that it may not happen if we're lucky and work at it? Why's he wrong and the campaign's message right? By Maytham insisting he was wrong - I think Maytham interrupted him - he lost the full context of what the caller said, and with the follow-up caller too who reiterated what the first caller said (people don't listen properly to what is said on his show, Maytham said). Isn't that what the campaign is about - that it may not happen if we're lucky and work at it? Are they wrong, i.e., it will happen but the campaign's message right? Both can't be correct.

This is what I mean about the self-righteousness of the self-appointed water police, including often hysterical media, who while this was developing since late 2016 overlooked or forgot to ask the city what it was doing to avoid the day, which is almost upon us. Instead they accepted, mostly at face value, the city's incompetence and spurious and tendentious version wasteful residents were/are to blame for everything.