Gold, scorched earth and water: the hydropolitics of Johannesburg

Abstract

Johannesburg is an unusual city because it is one of the few major cities of the world that does not lie on a river, a lake or a seafront. Since the discovery, of gold in 1886, Johannesburg has grown from a dusty mining town to a major urban and industrial conurbation that houses and sustains a quarter of the total population of South Africa, accounting for 10% of the economic activity on the entire African continent. Water supply to Johannesburg is done by Rand Water, which is credited with sustaining the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere that is not located on a river. This poses major challenges to engineers because the geology associated with the gold-bearing reef is also associated with the watershed between two major international river basins in Southern Africa, the Orange and the Limpopo. Having been classified as pivotal basins in the Southern African Hydropolitical Complex, these two river basins form the strategic backbone to the economies of the four most economically developed countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region-South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. In order to sustain the urban and industrial complex in what is best described as the Greater Johannesburg Conurbation, massive Inter-Basin Transfers (IBTs) are necessary, posing a challenge to the notion of a river basin as a fundamental unit of management within the framework of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), because in essence even, river basin in South Africa is now hydraulically connected to every other river basin, with this pattern starting to cross international borders in an increasingly complex web of transfer schemes. This supports the notion that the management of water in transboundary river basins is now starting to impact on the political relations between states, which is the essence of the rationale behind the emerging Southern African Hydropolitical Complex.