Water expert suspended (CSIR / Dr Anthony Turton)

By Sheree Béga

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has suspended a leading water researcher over a presentation he was to deliver about South Africa's water crisis this week.

The council executive of the CSIR on Friday suspended Dr Anthony Turton, an acclaimed political scientist, with immediate effect, charging him with insubordination and bringing the CSIR into disrepute. 

His keynote address, A Clean South Africa, was to be presented at the CSIR's "Science Real and Relevant" conference in Pretoria this week, but he was forbidden from delivering it because it contained "unsubstantiated" facts, according to the executive, as well as photographs of this year's xenophobic attacks, which, the executive added, "may disturb people".

In his presentation, Turton was to have said that South Africa had run out of surplus water, with 98 percent of it already allocated. And because most rivers and dams were highly polluted, they had lost the ability to dilute effluents. 

Poor water quality was threatening economic growth, he added. The pollution ranges from acidic mine pollution from coal and gold mining, levels of eutrophication [characterised by an abundant accumulation of nutrients that support a dense growth of algae and other organisms, the decay of which depletes the shallow waters of oxygen in summer] "unprecedented globally" in rivers and dams, and radio-nuclide and heavy-metal contamination from a century of largely unregulated gold mining that had left residents of Soweto, Ekurhuleni and the West Rand living on "contaminated land".

Turton said the government needed to accept that the development targets of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for SA were simply unobtainable, or radically rethink how to mobilise the country's science, engineering and technological capacity.

"If we accept the former option, we can say social instability will grow and SA will slide into anarchy. The xenophobic violence is a taste of things to come if we follow this trajectory… Do we wish to avert the water crisis now before it happens or are we to be content with the status quo, happy to deal with it after it has been thrust upon us like the electricity crisis was?"

CSIR spokesperson Hilda van Rooyen said an internal investigation was under way.

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/