South African Scientist Exposes The Scary Truth Behind The National Water Crisis

Our water crisis in South Africa is so critical that unless we turn it around literally in the next election cycle, that's the last chance we're going to get to turn it around. The water mafia isn't the cause of the failure. The water mafia is a symptom of the failure. And the bigger the crisis, the bigger the invoice that they can put in. I'm not one to sound alarmist. We are breeding in South Africa now the next generation of multi-drug-resistant pathogens. They deflect responsibility, they deny that it ever took place, and they demonize the messenger. He lost a leg while swimming in a lagoon in the Natal South Coast, and he lost that, he alleged, to a thing called necrotizing fasciitis. And necrotizing fasciitis, it means flesh-eating bacteria.

What does this mean? Is it quality of water? Are people drinking dangerous water, or they're just not getting any water? Hello, Truth Report. If you thought the ANC had finished screwing up our economy and our democracy and our country, you're wrong. If you thought load shedding was the last ANC crisis to be hurled upon our poor country, you were wrong. We have one crisis hitting us, and that is even greater than load shedding, and that is the water crisis. And while we need electricity to grow our economy, We need water to survive. And I have a very special guest who has been warning South Africa for 20 years about this impending water crisis, which has now hit. He put his hand up. He spoke out. He spoke truth to power, and he got suspended from the CSIR for his efforts. We have, and I'm very proud to welcome, Dr. Antony Turton, to the Truth Report. Antony, welcome.

Good day to you and the listeners. Thank you very much for that introduction. Now, just to make one correction, when I was speaking at that time in 2008, I was the official spokesperson at the CSIR, so I was presenting the scientific factual basis to South Africa. It was not my own personal opinion in any way, shape, or form. It was, it was, it was the consensus of the scientific community. And at that point in time, we still had a formidable scientific community. You must appreciate that we'd just been through a very, very traumatic period of time. We just had launched a new National Water Act. Water had been nationalized, and the National Water Act brought about all kinds of sweeping changes. And one of them was it took rights to water away from individuals. But more importantly, it instigated a thing called the environmental reserve, which meant that that a certain amount of water had to be reserved for environmental flows. And it also mandated a thing called the National Water Resource Strategy. So the first National Water Resource Strategy was done, completed in 2002 and published in 2003. I was part of the team that did some of that work. All the top scientists in the country were busy with that project. And based on that, we determined that if we apply the National Water Act requirements, then we allocated 98% of all the water we have available to high assurance for supply. and some of the water management areas had been overallocated by as much as 120%. So what should have happened then was that the CSIR should have developed a strategy. And I was part of developing a national water quality strategy. And then when I was suspended, I was actually very advanced in developing that national water strategy that was bought into by, amongst other things, major players in commerce and industry. Major multinational corporations, many, many different big players in the country that had all bought into that strategy. So that is all terminated when I was suspended.

What is the water crisis that we're facing today?

The water crisis in a nutshell is a crisis of institutional failure. It's not that we don't have water. Our dams are relatively full. We have a lot of water in the dams. But the institutions that allocate water, the institutions that manage water, they have failed. And the failure is most acute in the large metros. And it's most acute the closer you get to the level of the individual. So in other words, it's not necessarily a failure of the national government. It's actually a failure of the Constitution because the Constitution has got a clause in it called the cooperative governance clause that says quite clearly that national government may not interfere with the affairs of municipal government. And as a result, it's actually a constitutional deadlock because, you know, how can we prevent systemic failure from taking place if we apply that clause? So, so the bottom line is that it's a, it's a failure of institutions most acutely felt in, in, in the big metros, but also already far advanced in the smaller towns and cities.

What does this mean? Is it quality of water? Are people drinking dangerous water or they're just not getting any water?

Okay, so let's just get into some technical things. I have to explain some very simple technical principles that people can understand what water security is about. It's dependent on a concept called assurance of supply, AOS, assurance of supply. So what is the assurance of supply? The assurance of supply is a guarantee of 6 things. So let's quickly unpack those 6 things. It's a guarantee of a given volume of water at a given pressure, at a given quality, at a given price, at a given time, in a given place. And this is given a numerical value, and this numerical value is 98%. So in other words, the design standards are that you will have those 6 things met 98% of the time, which means you can have 2 failures in 100 years or 1 failure in 50 years. So that's the design standard. And once you deviate off that standard in any consistent way, you've effectively got failure.

So where are we on that 98%?

The very fact that there is a thing called water shifting, or that there's a thing called watershedding or water throttling, and they call it all these funky words. The very, very fact that we got that means that the system is unable to meet those 6 requirements for assurance of supply at all points in the system. So they now have to choose. If you take Johannesburg, Johannesburg's got 194 subsystems, so they have to choose which of those 194 are going to get preference over another. So the system has already failed.

And is this an infrastructure problem or is this water mafia or both?

It is essentially an infrastructure failure problem, but the infrastructure failure problem is also intimately linked to the management problem. So management is designed to understand problems and to mitigate risks arising from problems. You know, you in the corporate world, that's what managers do. So if you don't understand what the problems are, or if you don't have the capacity to know, for example, how old your infrastructure is and what piece of infrastructure must be maintained or upgraded or changed out for a new system, if you don't know any of those things, then you can't manage the system effectively. So the institutional failure is the inability to read those things. And in fact, what shocks me the most is that most of the municipalities in South Africa do not have an asset management system in place. They do not have an asset management register in place. And without that register, they don't know which piece of equipment is what age, what the cost will be of recovery, how to sequence the, the, the maintenance cycle in, etc. So in other words, without that management information, managers make decisions based on numbers and based on probabilities and costs and and liabilities, etc. But if you don't have that flow of information, then you are flying blind. It's like you're flying into the mountains with a jet aircraft, a passenger jet aircraft, and suddenly all your instruments are down. You know you're in the mountains, you haven't hit the mountain yet, but you don't quite know how far you are from the mountain. But you know that you are below the altitude of the peaks of some of those mountains. So this is incompetent management, incompetent management Fundamentally, it is fundamentally, it's management that is unable to self-correct. If you want to call it incompetent management, you know, it's management that is unable to even grasp the seriousness of the problem.

It's a man-made problem, entirely man-made.

It's an institutional problem. It's entirely a man-made problem. Because once again, if you look at the dams, so the dams are full. If you look at the rivers, the rivers are full, they're bad quality, but they're full. It's not a water quantity problem. It's a water delivery problem and it's not a water delivery problem in the sense that your big water boards have failed, although some of the water boards have failed. By and large, the water boards are still doing what they're supposed to do. It's actually a problem mostly affected at municipal levels and more importantly, at the level of your big metros. So your 4 big metros, these are the ones that are, that are, that are the most at risk. And we can, you know, we can toss up and ask which one's going to fail first. But, but those 4 metros are under extreme pressure simply because that's where your economic activity happens and that's where you've got the most complicated systems as well.

So which one is going to fail first?

Well, to me, it's a toss-up between either Durban or Johannesburg. Durban is in an advanced state of failure and they seem to have absolutely no ability to, to even realize how far gone they are. And the water mafia are most deeply entrenched there. And that's an important thing to note. The water mafia isn't the cause of the failure. The water mafia is a symptom of the failure. So, so, so it doesn't cause the failure. It accelerates the failure because once the water mafia moves in, what they do is they maximize their profits and they ensure that the invoices are going to get paid. And the bigger the crisis, the bigger the invoice that they can, they can put in. So it's an invoicing any crisis into, into cash flow kind of, kind of, kind of business model. And so what they do, do do is they are incentivized to go out and actually damage infrastructure. And we learned during the Luthers War of about 2021 in KZN, I managed to call the Luthers War a week before it happened. Part of what we saw there in the Luthers War was there was systemic sabotage taking place. And there were decisions that were being made at a centralized level that were very sophisticated and sending people to a specific place either to damage a specific thing, or in the case of the looters' war, to capture a particular intersection and to stop the flow of traffic or something of that nature. But this is a sophisticated thing. It's not— we mustn't think of the water mafia as being a bunch of pelucas that just go out there, you know, and shot tenders. They actually know how the system works, and they know where the vulnerable parts are in the system. That's what ultimately comes down to a national security crisis. because this is an existential, uh, risk for the, uh, for the viability of the South African economy.

Antony, this is what I've always said. The ANC is incompetent. They are unable to run a sophisticated economy. We are deindustrializing. The economy's growing, barely growing, 1%. You know, Gwede Mantashe has destroyed the mining industry. You can name ministry by ministry, the morons madness of their ideology and incompetence of their management skills, inability to run a first world economy. So they're turning it into a second and third world economy by design, because if they break things, they can steal. And I'll give, I'll give our viewers a little example and you can correct me about what is the water mafia. Well, you said the water mafia didn't create the problem. They're benefiting from the problem. I'd agree with that. The ANC, through incompetence, has broken the system. The mafia move in and take advantage of it. And how do they do that? If there's no water supply in a municipality, the municipality has to get water. It's a basic human right, has to get water to the people, and therefore hires water tankers. The water tankers are owned and controlled by the mafia. And it's like when you have load shedding. The diesel, the people that actually bring in the diesel generators or bring in diesel itself benefit. It's in their interest. When Transnet fails, the trucking companies benefit. It's in their interest. So it's in the interest of the diesel mafia for Eskom to fail. It's the interest of the trucking mafia for Transnet to fail. And it's in the interest of the water mafia. For the water, municipal water systems to fail. The ANC breaks so their cadres can steal. Simple as that. Would you agree with that?

Yes, that's an accurate summary. In fact, I can, I can state that I was hired by a major law firm some time ago to do some confidential investigation work on behalf of one of their clients. They were litigating and it was a sewage problem in this case. And I was put into, into the area. I did some reconnaissance, sort of deep penetration reconnaissance. And what we found was the following. We found that there was one individual who was politically connected to the highest, highest authority, highest ANC person in that area. And they were simply— the only asset that they had was that a bakkie. And in the bakkie, that one person that I employed, and that person's role was to go and find which sewers they could throw rocks down and tires and block. They blocked appropriate sewers and then caused sewage spills to either go into houses, a bunch of ordinary houses where people live, or more importantly, the big payoff comes where you can flood a commercial retail shopping center. Once you flood that retail shopping center, you've now got an existential crisis for that shopping center. And lo and behold, what they do is they go and they hire out to you the solution. This person was making in the order of about 2 million rand a month, just from doing that. For me, it was a mind-boggling thing. And every time I've been involved in any of these water mafia type of things, I've been— firstly, I've been surprised by number one, their close proximity to positions of power in all cases. And the second thing is the numbers of the turnover that these people can generate, relatively unsophisticated people, uneducated people, but they can turn over fairly big numbers, the kind of numbers that the average honest, hardworking citizen is unlikely to see, you know, in their lifetime. So these people are very enterprising. And once they come in, they are very, very difficult to dislodge. So by the time you get them, for example, if you've got them in Johannesburg, you're not going to easily get rid of them. Unless you have a concerted criminal investigation type of approach, you've got to, you've got to root this thing. So once they're in, I refer to them as a cancer that metastasizes. Once you've got that one cell in your, in your body, that just simply metastasizes and you've just got to excise that one cell.

South Africa's cancer is the ANC, very simply, and it's metastasizing. It's, it's killing every single sector, every single industry. And, you know, Prince Meshale said there are two groups responsible for Cyril Ramaphosa and CR17. One, white corporates and white businessmen who got all excited about Ramaphoria, but two, the mafia, the gangsters, because they benefit accordingly. And they're the two groups to blame for Cyril Ramaphosa being in power. And I pray to God the same groups don't get behind Patrice Motsepe. For the same reason. So they can, you know, the whites getting all excited. Oh, you know, Cyril was a disaster. We admit, but Patrice is going to be better because he's a businessman. The same old, same old. But the mafia benefit. The mafia are hardwired into the ANC government. Cyril and his merry crew know exactly what's going on. They look the other way. The cadres, BEE, and the mafia steal and break. But for our viewers, Antony, please tell us some specific examples of what's happening in South Africa vis-à-vis the water crisis. Give me some municipalities, some towns, some, you know, are taps running dry and where?

This is a complex question that I will try and simplify it as best I can. Our biggest problem is our collapsing sewage systems. So if you just give me some numbers. So we've got, let's call it, 60 million people in South Africa. And each person generally uses 200 liters of water per person per day. So let's just, let's just sort of round that out and let's say that half of that ends up as sewage return flows, either bathwater return flows, shower water, or toilet flush return flows. So we've got a substantial volume of sewage return flows. And the way that South Africa was engineered, remember, South Africa is the 27th driest country. We always hear all the time. And because of that, it is— it was engineered right from the very beginning to have an indirect water reuse model. So we already recycle our sewage back into drinking water. And the way we do that is we, we are obliged to discharge our sewage return flows after treatment at a wastewater plant back into the river. And it has to be at the highest possible standard, almost potable quality standard, because it goes into a river and somewhere else down the river, someone else is going to take it out to drink. And because of our— this is called the green drop reporting standard. And because of our failure of the green drop reporting system, now we've overwhelmed our potable water systems. The potable water systems were never, ever designed to, to take effectively raw sewage and turn it into potable quality water. So our biggest single crisis is the fact that we are overwhelming the rivers with, with untreated sewage. And there's a whole ramification of things that we can, we can go down a rabbit hole, a lot of rabbit holes if you want to. But on the human health-related issues, there's the emergence of multi-drug resistance pathogens. There's the fact that all of our bulk treatment plants were never designed to treat sewage-contaminated water. So we've got to recapitalise all of those plants. So then there's a whole raft of issues that come out of that. But the fundamental problem is half our sewage treatment plants have failed completely. So we are putting in— that's just a rough number. But we are putting in completely untreated or at best partially treated sewage back into the system. And if you know, if you've got savvy listeners, they will know that when you go to a medical doctor and you're ill and the doctor gives you antibiotics, the doctor says to you, finish, finish the complete course of antibiotics. Why? Because whether you take the first 2 antibiotics and you start feeling better and then you stop using the antibiotics and all that's happened is you've whacked You've wiped the weak guys, the weak bad guys out of the system. But the strong guys are still there. The same with sewage. When you, when you return partially treated sewage, you've only taken the weak, the weak pathogens out, but the strong guys are still there. So now we've got these rivers and dams and aquatic ecosystems of ours that have got perfect conditions because they, they've got high, high flows of nutrients. They've got high flows, high temperatures because of global warming, etc. And more importantly, they are growing under perfect conditions in the presence of low concentrations of antiretroviral drugs, low concentrations of hormones, low concentration of, of, of a whole— every single product that society takes ends up down, down the sewer. So you've got a partially, partially metabolised antibiotics, etc. So we are breeding in South Africa now the next generation of multi-drug resistant pathogens. Now, I'm not one to sound alarmist, but you know what I'm saying now? That does sound very alarmist. But what I've told you now is factually correct, absolutely factually correct. And just last, last week, I was taken on on one of my social media posts by a South African woman who's very angry now that I've left, left the country. And she She mentioned the fact that in Australia, where I now live, the Australians are not allowed to— Australian doctors aren't allowed to prescribe antibiotics. And she said this was a bad thing. Well, it's actually a good thing, because in Australia, we don't want to abuse this antibiotic system. We don't want to create the same crisis that we have in South Africa, where you've got the high level of HIV, but a high level of TB, and therefore you've got a high level of multidrug resistance pathogens. We want to prevent that from happening. So in other words, you know, we're living in a situation where, uh, if you just take one of the, uh, one of the empirically verifiable examples of this now, and I'm not being alarmist here at all, I'm just giving you pure fact. There's a famous guy in South Africa called R.W. Johnson, Dr. R.W. Johnson. Now, R.W. Johnson lost a leg and he lost a leg, uh, while swimming in a lagoon in the Natal South Coast. And he lost that, he alleged, to a thing called necrotizing fasciitis. And necrotizing fasciitis, it means flesh-eating bacteria. And he's not the first person. He's not the only person to have lost it. He was just a high-profile person, and it's verifiable. You can contact him, you can bring him on the show, and he'll talk to you about it. There are other people. There was a fisherman in the Wild River who happened to stump his toe while catching carp or whatever it was on the Wild River. And he lost his toe. There was a woman who got it in the throat on the Vaal River, and she lost her throat. She had a whole, you know, literally a big piece of her throat had to be removed. So this is serious stuff. You know, people have actually died. There was a case in Durban, Mhlonga Rocks area, where a recognized medical practitioner, doctor, also happens to be a surfer, and he was out surfing in the morning off Mhlonga Rocks, and he happened to also pick up a Zoonectotizing fasciatus. But because he's an emergency room doctor, he was taken up immediately and managed to mitigate the risk. But he was— he came down with this, you see. So, so these things, because the, because the government attitude is, they use what I call the 3D strategy. They deflect, they deny, and they demonize. They deflect responsibility, they deny that it ever took place, and they demonize the messenger. So because of that 3D strategy, We've set ourselves up to fail. We've set ourselves up to become literally a huge disaster. So at one point, at what point in time are we going to wake up and smell the roses? Are we going to have how many more RW Johnsons before we realize that actually, you know, it's not a good idea to, to, to smother your rivers and your dams and your wetlands and your lagoons with partly treated or untreated sewage? You know, this is what human civilization has been about. Human civilization has taught us. You know, if you look at the Vikings, the Vikings managed to survive under primitive conditions because they understood that very fundamental fact that you keep your human excrement away from your food.

Antony, it's pretty clear to me the ANC are taking us back to pre-civilization. They don't care. And the only solution is to get rid of the ANC altogether. But we've been talking about quality of water. And that's clearly very worrying, very worrying what you've told me. But let's talk about quantity and supply. Are there parts of South Africa— give me examples where the taps are running dry for a week, for a couple of days.

Yes, there are parts of South Africa where that is happening. A lot of the rural towns, you know, when day zero happened in Cape Town, I did a lot of media reporting at that point in time, and I was criticized by some of the more radical left-wing elements, because they said that Day Zero is only a factor now in Cape Town because white people are being affected. But it's actually a reality in rural South Africa. And it's just true. I mean, Day Zero has been happening in large parts of South Africa. And we're seeing it now increasingly happen in the big metros. I, before I came to Australia, I lived in KZN. And there in KZN, we had literally weeks on end, I live in the Port Shepstone area. We had weeks on end in the district municipality where there was no water. We were obliged to put down a borehole and there was a whole lot of rigmarole around that. So literally, I can say without any, any contradiction that there are large parts of the country where it's quite commonplace to have an erratic water supply. In Johannesburg, in Pretoria, you know, certainly in Durban, you have an erratic water supply. And for me, the big surprise is places like, like Port Elizabeth, Port Elizabeth, which is based on, on the hydraulic mission of South Africa, which was another story. But the hydraulic mission was about creating hydraulic certainty so that you can build industry to create jobs, to prevent people, young, young men from joining liberation movements. And from that came the motor manufacturing capability in, in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage area. So the entire motor, motor manufacturing industry is created on the Orange River, Orange Fish Sundays, Humptus Interbasin Transfer. That's falling to pieces. It hasn't been maintained for some time. And so your entire industrial complex there is failing. And if we just look at another place, Durban, Durban South has got a concentration of what's called heavy, noxious industry, chemical factories. And of course, in that heavy, noxious industry area, is Toyota, the Toyota manufacturing plant. Well, they were flooded out a while ago because they happened to be built in a wetland. And the only way you can stay viable in a wetland is if your drainage canals are maintained and kept in good condition. Well, the Umlazi Canal was not maintained. There was a big rain that came down. The dam upstream of Umlazi failed. There's a land claim in that dam area. So that's another complicating factor. But the bottom line is that Toyota was flooded. And I don't know if they are internationally competitive anymore, because the cost of retooling and repairing and getting back online is just so great. So I think we, we are literally at a point in South Africa where we are going to start accelerating our deindustrialization process, simply because you cannot expect multinational corporation to make a major capital investment decision, or do they drop money in South Africa or in Brazil or somewhere else in the world to increase their capacity? And their risk committee is going to want to know what is the water security situation like. And unless we can get across to the public that water security is not about the 2 liters of water you drink a day, it's It's about the 200 liters that you use every day just to keep your body clean. It's about the 3,000 liters of water per day that you consume in the food that you eat. So it's the big water, the water for food. For every calorie of food produced, there's about 1 liter of water involved. Your water security leads to loss of food security, and you start getting a sort of buildup now. Into a loss of national security. So these are all very, very important things. And they know they, they, they, they sober matters. We need to speak about them in a sober, rational way.

Wouldn't that be nice? You used the word maintenance, and I want to just harp on that. It doesn't seem to me that the word maintenance exists in the ANC lexicon. And if there's a maintenance line, an allocation, a budget allocation to maintenance, when it comes to anything, really, not just water. The ANC sees that as money they can steal. And that, I think, you've been warning about for 20 years. There has been no maintenance and the infrastructure is crumbling and is reaching a point of no return. Would you agree?

I'll come to that same conclusion, but through a different route. So if you'll allow me to. So the fact is that Johannesburg is the most industrialized part of the African continent. Fact. And it happens to be on a plateau. It happens to be a high altitude above sea level, and it happens to be in the highveld area. So it's a grassland area. And the reason why it's grassland is there are no trees because there's not enough rainfall. So the only way that the highveld can exist is to pump water uphill to power and money. And the more water you pump uphill to power and money from the Tugela River and from any other river that's nearby, You use surplus energy on the Eskom grid to pump water uphill. And then when the water flows down the other side, you capture 60% of the energy that you put into it to pump it up the hill. So we need to appreciate that there are very sophisticated engineering systems that sustain 60% of the economy and 40% of the population of South Africa just in those systems. Now, I mean, this, this, this is, this is a mind-boggling fact. And this is all about human, human acumen, human capital, institutional capability to understand what needs to be done next.

You wrote a book that you didn't publish.

Yeah.

And, and I did read some of the chapters in it. Thank you for sending it to me. And if you can address the issue of capital investment into infrastructure and the remaining useful life of the infrastructure in South Africa, just the disparity of that. You're smiling.

Yeah. Okay. So when I was preparing that fateful paper of mine, that 2008 keynote address for the CSIR conference, Science Real and Relevant, because I was liaising very widely with big mainstream players, I had a very high-level link-up with a senior guy in the Department of Water Affairs, and I showed him a graph about the collapse of the CSIR. It was a peak, you know, it showed a peak in 1985 and from 1985, a steady decline since then, like a linear decline. And he said, that's funny you should mention that because look at— I'm responsible for infrastructure maintenance and the same is happening in infrastructure. And he showed me his graphs and that paper of mine actually used the Department of Water Affairs own data and the CSIR's own data to show that all of our systems from 1985 onwards have started to fail simply because 1985, that is at the height of the end of the armed struggle, and all of our capital was going into the military at that point in time. We were unable to keep these things going. So we started seeing systemic collapse. So the bottom line is, if you look at the individual asset classes, for example, pipelines or dams, etc., each has got a different lifecycle. And a dam typically has got 100, maybe 200-year life life cycle, but your pipelines may be 50 years. So each of these things have got a different finite lifespan. And at that point in time, when I wrote that paper, we were reaching a point where probably 80 or 90% of the assets had maybe less, less than 10% of their remaining useful life left in them. And of course, nothing's been replaced since then. Now we suddenly wake up and catch a wake-up call, and there's this new magic department now that's been created Department of Infrastructure, whatever, Hanakiri. And that, all that, that is now, that is simply to internalize the tender capture process. So now, now you've got an internalized, a corporatized body that's going to capture all the tenders, and then they're going to feed off all of the, all the massive flows. They, they, they don't have the ability to actually, uh, generate the piece of paper that says we want you to tender on a pipeline of this length and this wall thickness that must operate under these pressure conditions, you know, for this period of time. They don't have that capacity. They just say, give us a tender for this thing, you know. And I'm afraid it's— I don't want to sound pessimistic, but we have left it too little too late. And we can still turn the ship around. And I think we should at least try to turn the ship around. But all things being equal, unless we have a gargantuan effort, gargantuan effort, I'm prepared here on your platform to make a prediction again. And that prediction is, unless we wake up and smell the roses, within the next election cycle, we're not going to get a chance after that. So the election cycle after the coming one, that's going to be game, set, and match, it's going to be over. So there's this, this coming election cycle is literally the last chance that the big metros have of turning the ship around. And the only way to turn the ship around is to depoliticize the process, depoliticize water, And you've got to securitize it. You've got to say, this is a national security matter. You've got to let the security people— they understand risks— let the security guys come in, take over, and you've got to get all the jochos out of the system. For the international people, I don't know what a jocho is. You'll have to explain what a jocho is. But you've got to get all the jochos out of the system because the system is infected with jochos. So you can explain what a jocho is.

A jocho is a little insect, but it's an insect that corrupts and gets in the way of making things happen. That's probably the easiest, politest way to say it. Can I ask you a question? The 4 big metros or 5 big metros, one is run by the DA.

Yeah.

The rest are run by the ineptocratic and kleptocratic ANC. Is there a ranking of best to worst amongst those metros?

Without any question of doubt, Cape Town stands head and shoulders above the rest and for a number of reasons. The one reason is that they went into day zero. So they have literally come the closest to failure, and they pulled back from the very, very precipice. So Cape Town has done a lot of good things. But the problem with Cape Town is that there's a very, very large community of people that are very negative towards the DA. So there's a huge, huge, what I describe as a trust deficit. And this trust deficit is going to constantly poison the waters there because every solution that's been proposed— desalination, for example, recovery of water from waste— all of these are technically viable solutions, but they are being opposed by this group of individuals. So that's the one problem there. Then, of course, the rest, it's hard to say. I know which is the worst one, and that is Durban, without any question of doubt. I think eKurileni and Pretoria are sort of in the category of reasonable category, Johannesburg is in dire straits, absolutely dire straits.

And they've all been run by the ANC. So there we go. It's pretty clear what the conclusion is in my mind.

If we just zoom in on Johannesburg, part of the problem is that Johannesburg Water as an entity, if you just hone in on to that, I mean, you're a businessman, you understand how corporates work. So, so you've got a board of directors and they all earn massive salaries. They all earn salaries, you know, they're in the top 2% salary earners in the country. So they're big money earners, but they are selected from the ANC Youth League and they're selected from all of the different, the different hoekho organizations, the feeder organizations that have to get a little bit of the patronage. So very few of them are technically competent and none of them know about extending the existing remaining useful life of assets. They don't understand that. Okay, so that's the one problem. But the second problem now is they They haven't got ring-fenced financing, so they cannot have control of their own cash flow. They cannot collect cash and they cannot be accountable for the cash that they collect and then allocate that over the next project or the, or the, or a serious cascading priority list. You know what must be prioritized first and second. They can't do that. So if you can't do that, then I mean, there's no way on Mother Earth that you're going to solve that problem. Because it's literally, it's a leaking sieve. So you've got to plug that leaking sieve up. So, so that's the best example that I can think of. And I mean, Johannesburg's got 194 subsystems that work, 194. I don't know of any system in South Africa that is more complicated than that. And I doubt if anyone in Johannesburg Water has got one map or one plan that says, aha, this is on the wall and these are where the pipes are and, and, and this is the central point. And you know, this is what comes in here and it goes out there and They haven't got that. So, so now we've got to get the very, very basics. As you know, in management, if you can't measure, you can't manage. So you've got to be able to measure and then you've got to control. The fiduciary responsibility of a director is to be held accountable for the money, the cash, and the assets that you are responsible for. But there is no fiduciary responsibility because there's, you know, the institution is so fundamentally flawed. So we've got to really get real. And I'm hoping that whoever wins the the election in Johannesburg. I'm really hoping that they can pull it together. Because if you look at the fastest rate of failure in Johannesburg that I've seen was under the coalition government where the mayor was a minority individual, a minority guy who was the most fringe of all parties. But he came in from nowhere and he was just put in there simply to a coalition game, but never made a decision completely still to this day, and as confused about how the system works as the first day that he walked into the job. But he's taken home a few million rands worth of salary.

I think Helen Zille alone could fix Johannesburg. I'm praying that she wins with an outright majority, but here's hoping. You're a true South African patriot, but you've left the country. And there must have been a huge skills, immigration of skills of people like you to other parts of the world, just out of Frustration, fear, whatever. Are there people left that can fix this problem? Are there people like you who are committed, who are willing, who are prepared to put their hands up and prepare to face the haters, face the ANC and try and fix this problem? Can we turn this around?

A good friend of mine, again, a Keza old boy called Ron Weisenberg. He, uh, he had a long conversation with me a while ago and he said to me, Turton, uh, you know, you, you're not an immigrant, you're a, you're a, uh, What do you— what do you call me? An exile? So you're an exile, not an immigrant. And I said, no, I'm an immigrant. I've left the country. It's, you know, I'm adopting the country of my adoption. This is where I am now. I'm going to become an Australian. You know, he asked me, do I root for the Springboks? Well, that's a bit more difficult. Okay. Then he said to me, he thinks I'm an exile. So I said, what do you mean an exile? How do you define an exile? And he said, an exile is a person that has got a deep love for his country. And wants to go back, wants to go back because they don't actually want to leave the country of their birth. And I think that accurately describes me and probably describes many, many people that I know. So that's how I feel. You know, it's a— South Africa is a lovely country. It's a country, you know, we're the only country in the world where a sitting government decided to negotiate itself out of existence for, you know, for better or worse, they did it. The only country in the world where an incoming president looked at his jailer and said, you are as much a victim of the system as I am. That's remarkable. The only country in the world that had weapons of mass destruction and voluntarily relinquished them. We now know from Ukraine that that's maybe not a good idea, but nonetheless, we did it. Okay, we're the only country in the world that actually decided to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where victim and perpetrator could confront each other. South Africa is a remarkable country. We're the first guys to develop a human heart transplant. We had the most sophisticated artillery in the world. You know, South Africa is a competent country. So, so, so, for me to see all of this go to waste simply because of ineptitude, absolute ineptitude, and the criminalization. And in fact, I'll say one more thing. As you know, I served in the intelligence services, and I served in the intelligence service over the period of amalgamation. And so I came from the old National Intelligence Service into the— I became a founding member of the South African Secret Service. And I served under a guy called Billy Masetto as a DG, and I served under a couple of very senior ANC guys. And I was very surprised after I left the service that one of those people made a public statement, a public statement on Facebook, no, made a public statement that the ANC has become a criminal syndicate masquerading as a liberation group. That is a senior ANC guy. I was under his chain of command. And I looked up to him with deep respect as a senior officer that I could Literally, I would respect that man. And here we are. So now we've got to call it out. We've got to, we've got to have enough courage. We don't have people with courage. And this is why I really respect what you're doing. You're a person of courage. You're a person that comes from the corporate sector. You say things and sometimes people say, whoa, you know, maybe he's gone a bit too far there. But you know, you've got the courage to say this stuff. And you know, I try and I try not to sort of be in that courageous category. But we've got to stand up and we've got to— facts are our friends. If we don't want to have facts as our best friends, then I'm afraid we are doomed. So bottom line is, my message here today is our water crisis in South Africa is so critical that unless we turn it around literally in the next election cycle, that's the last chance we're going to get to turn it around. It can still be turned around. The Titanic has hit the iceberg, but the Titanic is still floating. So that's it. That's where we are. The Titanic has hit, but we're floating. So let's stop fiddling around. Let's stop saying, oh, but desalination costs too much. And what about this chemical? And what about that chemical? Hana kiri, wara wara wara. That's all nonsense stuff. Okay. Australia has got almost 1,000 desalination plants, 1,000 desalination plants, and it's got less than half the population of South Africa. And not one person raises a peep about them. and they just get on with lives, making money, growing the economy, and everyone here lives a decent, comfortable life. Why don't we have that in South Africa?

Everybody, I want to just praise Dr. Antony Turton for being a patriot, courageous, and an extraordinary man. And it's very sad that he's moved to Australia as an exile. And maybe, maybe the upside here, Truth Report, is that this water crisis may at long last drown the ANC. Thank you very much.