When the water runs out …

There hasn’t been this much panic-buying since the crazy days before the first lockdown.

The supermarkets, corner shops and bodegas of parts of Joburg are fresh (sorry) out of bottled water.

Never mind that this is how millions of South Africans have always lived — half the day spent on making a plan to fetch water in drums, buckets and jerrycans and carry it home.

It’s not that there isn’t any water — there is, billions of cubic metres of the stuff. But it’s sloshing around in a shallow lake 100km away from where it’s needed … and without working pumps, it may as well be on the moon.

So how did the richest city in Africa get to the point where water tankers are milling about in the long shadows cast by empty concrete water towers?

This is how. First take a mountain ridge stuffed with gold and build a city on it. The city, unlike any other major city in the world (except Birmingham), is not built on a lake, a river or the sea.

But that’s OK because the wells in the west will be enough to slake our thirsts — until they run dry.

To fix that, build a dam, downhill from this city of money, and lay big, fat pipes.

Now pump the water — uphill all the way — from the dam, using the bountiful “juice” supplied by the beneficent state-owned electricity company.

When the water in that dam isn’t enough, lay more pipes and link them to more dams built far away in the mountains of another country that might, one day, get the hump with its greedy, meddling neighbour and turn off the spigot.

What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, that hissing sound you hear when you turn the taps on? That’s the sound of votes flowing away … unlike the water that we don’t have.