A JoJo tank half full

JoJo tank owners are like vegans. No sooner you meet them, they tell you their storage capacity. Which is why Brian was excited. He had finally joined the club and had spent an impressive amount of money on a JoJo tank, along with a pump and filter. At last, he would be prepared for water outages.

After weeks of irritatingly stable supply, it finally happened. The Glenhazel area had had all the pipes replaced and the switchover would result in a few days of sporadic water.

This was his time to shine.

And it would have been, had his gardener not noticed that his swimming pool was looking a little undernourished and had he not decided that it needed to be filled. Which is why with great enthusiasm, he turned on the tap putting the JoJo tank to remarkable use.

For Moshe, it was a similar, but different story. His gardener had used the entire tank to water the lawn that probably could have managed without nourishment for a day or two. Moshe wasn’t happy but being the boy scout he is, he called in a plumber to reverse pump some water from his swimming pool into his JoJo tank so that they could at least have water to flush the toilets.

Smart and resourceful. Until his pool guy arrived and noticed that his pool was empty and, you guessed it, filled the pool with water from the same tank. Leaving him pretty much back where he started and in the same position as Brian. And the rest of us without JoJo tanks.

Both are true stories. And both are quintessential examples of what it means to be South African. They are stories that reflect our privilege and our disadvantage.

As an aside, we’re fortunate to have no need for a JoJo tank, as the half-filled bottles of mineral water scattered strategically around the inside of my wife’s car are enough not only to sustain us, but to fill our pool should it spring a sudden and dramatic leak.

It’s unsurprising that the recent water challenges have put people on edge. The increase in loadshedding and the fact that there’s hardly enough power to shine a light at the end of the tunnel is concerning and infuriating. But it’s important to distinguish between what is lack of provision based on failure and incompetence, and what is a few days of scant supply because of a systems upgrade. And whereas both appear to result in the same thing, they couldn’t be more different.

The water supply issues were difficult to manage. But it was part of an upgrade to the area that was needed, and that will place the area in strong position in the future. And that’s worth celebrating. With or without a JoJo tank.