South Africa proposes race quotas as citizens face deadly water shortage

South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government last month proposed race-based water quotas as citizens face a dangerous shortage.

The water famine is being described as a “knock-on effect” from energy shortages that have plagued the country since last year. South Africans frequently experience “load-shedding” — controlled rolling blackouts — which can last up to 15 hours a day and are expected to extend beyond 2023. In 2022, South Africans faced electricity cuts 288 days out of the year.

Though the ANC was alerted on several occasions that the country was headed toward a future power crisis, the government decided not to invest in infrastructure, reportedly because it was considering privatizing the state-owned power utility company, Eskom.

In the end, instead of being privatized, Eskom became a “feeding trough” for corrupt government officials under former President Jacob Zuma, according to Eskom’s outgoing CEO André de Ruyter. Analysts say that de Ruyter’s accusations, for which he has been accused of treason by the ANC’s energy minister, reveal “a ruling party rotten with corruption”.

Another factor contributing to the water shortage is corruption and theft within municipal councils who are not investing in proper water maintenance. 

Citizens who have the means to do so are drilling their own wells, while those unable to do so are forced to survive on less water, though their water bills remain the same.

"My water bill stays the same even with all the cuts. I feel frustrated, I don't have access to water alternatives [like a borehole] that would make this bearable for me," says 35-year-old Zizi Dlanga, according to the BBC.

White South African farmers face a particularly dire fate. Last month, the ANC’s Water Minister Senzo Mchunu drafted regulations that would allocate water use licenses based on skin color.

According to the proposed law, businesses in agriculture, mining and forestry who want to use more than 250,000 cubic meters of water must have at least 25% Black ownership to qualify for a water use license. Those who need more than 500,000 cubic meters require at least 50% Black ownership, and businesses using over a million cubic meters need at least 75% Black ownership to receive a license.

An estimated 60% of the country’s water is used for farming.

“Under these water race quotas, livestock will be left to die from thirst because a farmer has the ‘wrong’ skin colour,” said the Democratic Alliance in a statement. “Fields will go fallow because those who till it are ‘undesirable.’ Hundreds of thousands of workers, from all backgrounds, will lose their jobs as the parched agriculture and mining industries wither and die.”

Water quotas are the latest impediment facing White farmers in South Africa.

South Africa’s Afrikaner farmers — or Boers —are predominantly white, often destitute, and repeatedly attacked violently by Black supremacist supporters of the ANC.

Since taking power, the ANC advocated for Blacks to own more land which would bring more economic and political security. This idea took on a radical tone when Julius Malema, the founder of a militant ANC spin-off organization called Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) began urging Blacks to seize land from Whites, who make up approximately 7.7% of the population.

According to a report by AfriForum published in March, there were 333 reported attacks on Afrikaner farms last year and 50 murders. The numbers are down from 2021, which saw 415 farm attacks and 55 murders. Only 33% of murder suspects are arrested and convicted.

“Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the number of attacks actually decreased seeing as more and more cases are never reported to the police. I don’t think the public’s trust in the police has ever been as low as it is now,” said AfriForum Community Safety spokesman Jacques Broodryk.

In addition to murders, hundreds of thousands of destitute Boer Afrikaners who live in large squatter camps also face death from cholera and other diseases wrought by poor sanitation and water supply. Aid workers have blamed the disease-related deaths on intentional neglect by local ANC councils.

"Every year, these brave descendants of the proud Boer people have to fight court battles against evictions by town and city councils everywhere,” said aid worker Gideon van Deventer, according to Israel National News. 

"Sometimes these councils employ sly tactics, like charging the destitute for allegedly contravening all sorts of obscure council regulations, which is clearly a form of harassment and intimidation, as they own nothing, are clearly indigent, and can by no means be perceived as a threat to the mighty ANC in any form whatsoever.

"The ANC council and government policies of 'blacks first' will eventually be their ruin, especially if this case turns into an epidemic or a human rights disaster," van Deventer said.

This grim picture of Afrikaner life — particularly the farm murders — is said to be carefully constructed by the ANC, which some say intends to eliminate the White race from South Africa. 

In his memoirs, political veteran Mario Oriani-Ambrosini recalls a conversation he once had with South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa in the 1990s during negotiations for a new South African constitution:

In his brutal honesty, Ramaphosa told me of the ANC’s 25- year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.

But mainstream news outlets and journalists dismiss the possibility of a White genocide as a “far-right conspiracy theory” and deny that rampant hate attacks on Afrikaner farms are a significant problem. This was exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s directive in 2018 in which he ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the farm murders perpetrated against White Boer Afrikaners following a report by Fox News on the issue.