ANC champions Freedom Charter but doesn’t think water is a big enough issue

Melville resident Susan Jobson demonstrates as residents of Melville, Westdene and surrounding areas protest against the lack of water supply in their suburb and many parts of Johannesburg, 11 February 2026, along Main Street in Melville. Picture: Michel Bega/The Citizen Once you come to understand the comrades’ lust toward the Freedom Charter, you’ll understand why water is such a non-issue to the leadership class; it’s not mentioned in the Freedom Charter. I guess that in 1955, the thoughtful people of the Congress Alliance didn’t think that their own would be leading the charge of watering down the infrastructure 70 years later, so they never included it in the instruction manual.

If water wasn’t a big enough issue enough to plug it into the seminal document of freedom back then, what does that tell you about how bad our governance is now? It’s quite flippant to make the comparison, I know, and certainly philosophically inconsistent. It’s just that you can’t claim to be the party on the side of human rights, particularly socioeconomic rights, and then give us the guy that tells us he’s suffering, too, because he has to bath in a hotel.

Gosh, even Jacob Zuma was water-conscious enough to ensure his controversy was merely a shower. Nevermind. I forgot about the firepool.

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But worse, spending so many resources to disassociate with alliance partners like the DA and then probably handing the party Johannesburg, unless the electorate prefers no water, or isn’t fooled by the DA’s blue logo giving the subconscious hint that it’s got lots of water to give. You’d think that having experienced the glories of load shedding and foreshadowing escaped Cape Town’s Day Zero crisis, there would be some attempt to prevent the Johannesburg taps running dry… and staying dry for weeks. The people can go without water.

That should be the wording of the new freedom charter. After all, it promised freedom, not water. And the constitution?

What about that little right hidden in Section 27 about the progressive realisation of sufficient water? Well, if you are a fan of the basic education system, then maybe you, too, can be a language artiste and interpret realisation to deterioration. If I didn’t have to conserve my liquids, I’d be wetting myself at the thought that nobody seems to be doing anything to fix the problem, let alone the years of not doing anything to prevent it in the first place.

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