Of course politics plays a role in the situation we find ourselves in. Not to the extent to which some people are making out out to be though. Twitter has become a battlefield of people blaming various political parties. I do believe that they should be held accountable, but people shouldn't be so focused on the blame game. We need to focus on the bigger issue.
To fully understand this issue, you need to have an idea of South African politics so here is a basic outline:
There are various levels of government: national, provincial and municipal. Various parties tend to overlap because each votes for its own party. In parliament the seats are allocated to parties in a vote ratio and the president is the president of the party with the most votes.
At the moment the ANC (our national government) has power in eight of the nine provinces. In the Western Cape, my province, it's the DA.
Different people have different views on this, but I feel like the national government isn't doing enough about the crisis and leaving it mainly to the provincial and municipal governments to sort out. The theory about this is that the ANC wants to make the DA look incompetent so that they can gain power in the Western Cape.
Meanwhile the DA is having internal issues which it is trying to sort out at the same time as the crisis. They need support from higher up in the government. They have, however, put most of that on hold while they desperately try to finish building infrastructure before the dams run dry.
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Parched: A Guide to a City in a Water Crisis
Non-FictionTo most it would sound like something out of a SciFi movie; something that belongs in the distant future, but in Cape Town, South Africa it is a reality: We are nearly out of water. Best rank: 634 in non-fiction on 8 February 2018
