Cape Town and Australia's future

Cape Town, a city of 4 million people, is about to run out of water and turn off its municipal supply. They've been in drought since 2015, and they've underinvested in infrastructure over the last 20 years. The net result is that the dams are almost empty, and they're going to have to turn it all off:

Cape Town residents may lose piped water to their homes within two months if they do not act to counter the effects of the worst drought to hit South Africa’s second city in almost a century.

Local authorities have warned its 4 million inhabitants that if they do not reduce consumption by “day zero” – 12 April – they will have to queue at 200 standpipes for daily rations of 25 litres (6.6 US gallons).

And that basicly means the end of modern civilisation in Cape Town - because running a modern city on 25l of water per day per person just isn't workable. Quite apart from the personal discomfort, the economic damage, and the logistical issues, modern public health depends on everyone having easy access to clean water. Take that away, and its a recipe for C19th epidemics again. As for the solution, if they don't get a pile of rain soon, basicly people will have to leave. Its like something out of The Water Knife...

As Geoffrey Palmer said, New Zealand is "an irreducibly pluvial nation", so our cities aren't in this sort of danger anytime soon. But its a different story over the ditch. Syndey has had serious water problems in the last decade, and while they're in the past, climate change means a serious risk that they'll happen again. According to the Australian Climate Council, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne are all going to get a lot dryer in the future, and this will impact their urban water supply. If they're hit by another prolonged drought, then they could easily end up like Cape Town. And if that happens, we're going to be getting Australian climate refugees.

South Africa pisses on the rule of law

Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is a wanted war criminal, the subject of two ICC arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Over the weekend, he attended a summit of African leaders in Johannesburg. The South African government granted him immunity. Human rights activists went to court seeking an order for his arrest, and won an injunction forbidding him from leaving the country. Today, the South African government ignored that and allowed him to depart:

The Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, has flown home, leaving South Africa in defiance of a court order that he must remain to face an international arrest warrant.

[...]

As Bashir’s plane took off from Waterkloof military airfield outside Pretoria, the local high court was hearing arguments over an application that would have forced the South African government to arrest him.

A South African judge criticised the government for allowing Bashir to leave. “The conduct of the respondents to the extent that they have failed to take steps to arrest and detain the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, is inconsistent with the constitution of the Republic of South Africa,” Dunstan Mlambo said.

The high court ruled after Bashir’s departure that he should have been detained.

So, we have a government defying its own courts to protect a war criminal. There's a name for people who do that: accessories. And they should be tried for it.

The Spy Cables

There's been another major leak of intelligence material, this time from South Africa to Al Jazeera and the Guardian. As usual, it exposes more dubiousness from governments, from Netanyahu's outright lies over Iran's nuclear program to South Africa's State Security Agency spying on its own government. It also appears much of the intelligence circulating to support the 'war on terror" is outright fantasy, given creedance by politicians because someone has stamped it "Top Secret". And then there's the really dubious stuff: South Africa spying on its own citizens at the request of other nations, and spying on non-hostile nations just so they've got something to trade.

And again, it raises the obvious question: if this is how the intelligence world works, are "our" spies doing this? Is the SIS spying on peaceful New Zealanders because some dipshit foreign authoritarian doesn't like what they say (yes)? Is the GCSB spying on our neighbours, who we quite like actually and want to get along with, because the US is interested in them (almost certainly). Such quid pro quo arrangements have nothing to do with our national security, and appear to be well outside our spy agencies' functions, and would therefore be illegal. But our intelligence oversight bodies are forbidden from investigating operational matters, or focused on process, rather than policy - which means that they don't provide oversight of this sort of thing. Which means the spies get to run riot.

Turning justice on its head

Two weeks ago, South African police massacred 34 striking workers at the Marikana mine. In a just country, those police would be put on trial, and if the evidence was sufficient, convicted and punished. instead, the South African state is prosecuting the surviving miners for murder using an Apartheid-era law:

Workers arrested at South Africa's Marikana mine have been charged in court with the murder of 34 of their colleagues shot by police.

The 270 workers would be tried under the "common purpose" doctrine because they were in the crowd which confronted police on 16 August, an official said.

Police opened fire, killing 34 miners and sparking a national outcry.

This turns justice on its head. The police are the killers here. Prosecuting their victims is as evil as Saudi Arabia's practice of prosecuting rape victims for "adultery".

But what it makes clear is that the "new" South Africa is pretty much the same as the old one. Black people are still kept in poverty, and murdered when they try to change that. The only difference is that a few of them now get to hold the whip that keeps the rest in line.

Secrecy in South Africa

Two months ago, South Africa became a founding member of the Open Government Partnership, a world body aimed at promoting transparency, accountability and participation on government. Today, after one too many stories linking top government officials to corruption, the lower house of their Parliament passed a secrecy law, allowing the government to declare any information secret in the "national interest" and imposing a 25-year jail term for possession or publication, with no public interest defence. The net result: journalists and whistleblowers will be treated like spies, and corruption will continue unabated.

The bill still has to pass the upper house, and will almost certainly be challenged in the constitutional court. But this is still a tremendous backwards step for South Africa, and one which shows that its government is intent on lining its own pockets and protecting its own rather than eliminating corruption.

The real District 9

While everyone is drooling over District 9 (which I agree is good, but somewhat ruined by a one-hour gunfight), spare a thought for the inhabitants of Chiawelo, the Soweto-edge slum the movie was filmed in. Real people live there, scrounging for a living in the same way the aliens did in the film. And like those aliens, they're going to be forcibly relocated to clear space for the "new" South Africa.

The film made US$90 million. The inhabitants of Chiawelo got fuck-all out of it. They're so poor they can't even afford to see it. It would be nice if the film studio gave a little more back.

South Africa votes

South Africa went to the polls yesterday in national and provincial elections. Now the results are beginning to come back - no thanks to the Independent Electoral Commission's crap election results site - and it looks like the ANC is just going to miss getting the two-thirds majority which lets them change the constitution. Meanwhile, the opposition Democratic Alliance has done well and managed to win control of Western Cape province. Both are Good Things, in a big picture sense - its always good for parties to have limits on their power, and to have to compete strongly for it.

But beyond the big picture, the election participants are somewhat uninspiring. The ANC's presidential candidate is Jacob Zuma, who some may remember from his messy rape trial a few years back (he was ultimately acquitted, after running the usual defence of accusing his victim of being a slut and a liar and arguing it was all consensual anyway. She was forced to seek political asylum in the Netherlands to avoid retaliation from Zuma's supporters). Then there's the corruption allegations which just don't seem to go away. OTOH, the opposition's attacks on Zuma seemed to cross the line into thinly-veiled racism, despite their anti-racist roots. As for the grandly-named Congress of the People, they're just a patronage network without a patron anymore. I wouldn't consider any of them to be worthy of my vote - but fortunately I don't live in South Africa, so I don't have to make that icky decision.

Update: It's now looking like the ANC will make two-thirds after all. Damn. It's not that I'm particularly worried about constitutional amendments - they had an amending majority last term but didn't use it - but more the principle of the thing. Governments should be weak and divided and unable to make such changes without having to seek and gain the consent of others.

Another link in the spider web

It seems that South Africa has just become the latest link in America's unlawful "spider web" of extraordinary rendition. In November last year, they arrested a man named Khalid Rashid, on suspicion of links to Al Qaeda. He was hooded, interrogated, taken to a military airfield and stuck on a private Gulfstream jet with no flight plan. His current whereabouts are unknown, and according to his lawyer, he has been rendered for interrogation, in violation of South African and international law.

This is a particularly depressing development for South Africa. While that country has had all sorts of problems since the fall of apartheid - poverty, inequality, crime - they'd made quite good progress on the human rights front. Now, they're going backwards, to the dark days of disappearances.

It is vital that the struggle against terrorism does not reduce us to terrorists and human rights abusers ourselves. As Mr Rashid's lawyer notes,

"Just because someone is accused of being a terrorist, his legal rights should not vanish and he should not vanish"

If we have to stopp to such levels as disappearance, rendition and torture, then in a very important sense, the terrorists will have won.