Cape Town Not Alone: The Eleven World Cities Most Likely to Run Out of Drinking Water

As a result of a 20th-century project to drain nearby swamps, water from the Atlantic Ocean began seeping in to the Biscayne Aquifer, Miami's main source of freshwater. Infographic credit: YouTube (source)

by Gaius Publius

One last follow-up to the Cape Town water crisis story. As you may know, the city of Cape Town, South Africa, is experiencing a severe drought that has reduced the region's dams to 30% or less of capacity (with the last 10% unusable). This has forced the local government to declare a Day Zero, described on the city's website as "the day we may have to queue for water."

At the moment, residents are urged to use no more than 50 liters of water per day — about 13 gallons — for all purposes, including drinking, bathing, flushing the toilet, washing dishes, watering plants and gardens, and so on.

If  Day Zero is reached, the water taps will be shut off by the city and water will be strictly rationed. Residents will have to queue for water with their buckets as water is doled out to them. On Day Zero, the ration will be reduced to 25 liters per day. As of this writing, Day Zero is June 4.

The Canary in a Very Large Coal Mine

I've called this a "canary in the coal mine" for other cities around the world, and indeed, for our species' climate prospects in general.

The BBC News website has a helpful list of eleven cities that are closes to the condition of Cape Town, but not quite there yet. Here's that list; Cape Town is just the tip of the iceberg.

• Heading the list — São Paulo, Brazil:

Brazil's financial capital and one of the 10 most populated cities in the world went through a similar ordeal to Cape Town in 2015, when the main reservoir fell below 4% capacity.

At the height of the crisis, the city of over 21.7 million inhabitants had less than 20 days of water supply and police had to escort water trucks to stop looting.

It is thought a drought that affected south-eastern Brazil between 2014 and 2017 was to blame, but a UN mission to São Paulo was critical of the state authorities "lack of proper planning and investments".

The water crisis was deemed "finished" in 2016, but in January 2017 the main reserves were 15% below expected for the period - putting the city's future water supply once again in doubt.

• Next, the tech-fueled city of Bangalore, India:

Local officials in the southern Indian city have been bamboozled by the growth of new property developments following Bangalore's rise as a technological hub and are struggling to manage the city's water and sewage systems.

To make matters worse, the city's antiquated plumbing needs an urgent upheaval; a report by the national government found that the city loses over half of its drinking water to waste.

Like China, India struggles with water pollution and Bangalore is no different: an in-depth inventory of the city's lakes found that 85% had water that could only be used for irrigation and industrial cooling.

Not a single lake had suitable water for drinking or bathing.

The problem in Bangalore is exacerbated by pollution from human waste; India in general is vastly deficient in toilets and a culture of using them.

• A city that may surprise you, a world capital yet, is next on the list — Beijing, China:

The World Bank classifies water scarcity as when people in a determined location receive less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person a year.

In 2014, each of the more than 20 million inhabitants of Beijing had only 145 cubic metres.

China is home to almost 20% of the world's population but has only 7% of the world's fresh water.

A Columbia University study estimates that the country's reserves declined 13% between 2000 and 2009.

And there's also a pollution problem. Official figures from 2015 showed that 40% of Beijing's surface water was polluted to the point of not being useful even for agriculture or industrial use.

To put those numbers in perspective, 1000 cubic meters per year is about 725 gallons per day per person. That's the break point for the World Bank's definition of "water scarcity."

In Beijing, 20 million inhabitants have about 100 gallons per day, one seventh of the allotment that defines "scarcity."

• Other cities on the list include Cairo (another world capital); Jakarta in Indonesia; Moscow, Istanbul, London and Tokyo (four more world capitals!) ... and Miami.

Miami's Water Troubles

Despite its large annual rainfall, the American city of Miami is especially vulnerable to drinking water shortages. BBC News again:

The US state of Florida is among the five US states most hit by rain every year. However, there is a crisis brewing in its most famous city, Miami.

An early 20th Century project to drain nearby swamps had an unforeseen result; water from the Atlantic Ocean contaminated the Biscayne Aquifer, the city's main source of fresh water.

Although the problem was detected in the 1930s, seawater still leaks in, especially because the American city has experienced faster rates of sea level rise, with water breaching underground defence barriers installed in recent decades.

Neighbouring cities are already struggling. Hallandale Beach, which is just a few miles north of Miami, had to close six of its eight wells due to saltwater intrusion.

Even without the problem of sea level rise, Miami's water supply is vulnerable to its water table, made of porous limestone.

Jeff Goodell, writing in Rolling Stone (emphasis added):

South Florida has two big problems. The first is its remarkably flat topography. Half the area that surrounds Miami is less than five feet above sea level. Its highest natural elevation, a limestone ridge that runs from Palm Beach to just south of the city, averages a scant 12 feet. With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won't just come in from the east – because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades. [emphasis added]

Limestone, a porous rock, that forms the Miami ridge also forms the floor, the region's water table:

Even worse, South Florida sits above a vast and porous limestone plateau. "Imagine Swiss cheese, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like," says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This means water moves around easily – it seeps into yards at high tide, bubbles up on golf courses, flows through underground caverns, corrodes building foundations from below. "Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."

Miami has been working since its founding to stave off salt water intrusion into its freshwater aquifer.

[In] the 1950s, people started noticing their drinking water was getting salty. In South Florida, the drinking-water supply comes from a big lake just below the surface known as the Biscayne aquifer. Engineers examined the situation and determined that the combination of draining the swamps and pumping out the aquifer had changed hydrostatic pressure underground and allowed salt water to move into the aquifer. To stop this, the Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District built dozens of these salinity-­control structures at key points on the canals. When they were closed, salty water wasn't able to flow into the canals. But if there was a big storm and intense flooding, the gates could be opened to allow drainage.

That worked pretty well for a time. The gates were engineered so that, when they were closed, the fresh water was about a foot and a half higher than the salt water. This freshwater "head" (as engineers called it) helped keep pressure in the aquifer and kept the salt water at bay.

But in the 50 years since the structures were built, much has changed. For one thing, nearly 80 percent of the fresh water flowing into the Everglades has been diverted, some of it into industrial-­agriculture operations. At the same time, consumption has skyrocketed: The 5.5 million or so people who now live in South Florida consume more than 3 billion gallons of water every day (including industry and agriculture). Almost all of that is pumped out of the aquifer, drawing it down and allowing more and more salt water to move in. At the same time, the sea level is rising (about nine inches since the canals were first dredged), which also helps push more salt water into the aquifer.

Says Jayantha Obeysekera, the chief modeler for the South Florida Water Management District, "Here, you can see the problem. The water is only 10 inches lower on [the saltwater] side than on the [freshwater] canal [side]. When this structure was built in 1960, it was a foot and a half. We are reaching equilibrium."

The engineering to address these problems is expensive. Installing new pumps on the freshwater side of the control structures cost $70 million each. The full cost of protecting Miami from a three-foot sea level rise will be "upward of $20 billion to $30 billion."

One day that cost will be deemed just too much, and Miami will be abandoned to the world without us — along with most of the other cities on the list above.

You can find more on coming water shortages in world cities at the EcoWatch website. Most of these regional problems, if not all of them, will become severe within the next decade. By most estimates, London, for example, will have to find new water sources by 2025. Trump, or Pence, may still be president by then.

Yes, it's happening now. The last generation kicked the can to this generation. It can't be kicked further.

GP
  

More on the Cape Town, South Africa, Water Crisis

What water rationing looks like, minus the anger (source).

by Gaius Publius

Earlier we wrote about the extreme water shortage in Cape Town, South Africa. Things are so dry there, and the dams so low, that it looked like the city would have to shut off their water taps by April 29, which they're calling "Day Zero." Seriously.

This piece updates that information and adds a couple of points.

First, the update, via the (Rupert Murdoch-owned) National Geographic:

How Cape Town Is Coping With Its Worst Drought on Record

Editor's Note: On Monday, February 5, Cape Town officials announced that the city had gotten “a slight reprieve” and that "Day Zero" had been pushed back to May 11. The reason: Fruit growers and other agricultural operations in the region have used up their annual water allocation, making more water available for the city. "There has not been any significant decline in urban usage," deputy mayor Ian Neilson stressed in a statement. With a heat wave forecast to increase evaporation from reservoirs, he said, Capetonians must reduce consumption “to prevent the remaining water supplies running out before the arrival of winter rains.”

A few things to note about this:

• The "growers ... have used up their annual allotment." This means that the agricultural industry there is SOL until the rains start. Translate that to a California context. 

• Urban usage has not declined. The obvious reason is that it's harder to enforce urban water rationing than agricultural rationing. There seems to be an "I'll get mine if I can" attitude among city dwellers. The social tensions have started. 

• Reservoirs are dangerously low due to the drought, and since it's their summer (while we have winter) the heat is causing water evaporation. As of the most recent reports, reservoirs are at just 30% capacity or less, with the last 10% unusable.

• The end of the crisis will come with the "arrival of winter rains," hopefully soon after Day Zero. That means around June or so, since their winter is our summer.

More from the report, first on how water rationing will work after the taps are — yes, literally — turned off by the city: "By late spring, four million people in the city of Cape Town—one of Africa's most affluent metropolises—may have to stand in line surrounded by armed guards to collect rations of the region's most precious commodity: drinking water."

Stand in line surrounded by armed guards to get your daily ration of water? Yes, that's what water rationing in a city-wide emergency looks like. 

The city is prepping 200 emergency water stations outside groceries and other gathering spots. Each would have to serve almost 20,000 residents. Cape Town officials are making plans to store emergency water at military installations, and say using taps to fill pools, water gardens, or wash cars is now illegal. Just this week, authorities stepped up water-theft patrols at natural springs where fights broke out, according to local press reports. They're being asked to crack down on "unscrupulous traders" who have driven up the price of bottled water.

The amount of rationing will be extreme. In early January, the city asked residents (note, asked) to use just 50 liters of water per day (which, the article notes, is less than one-sixth of what the average American uses). Day Zero will make those restrictions mandatory and reduce the quota to 25 liters per day ("less than typically used in four minutes of showering").

About those social tensions, city officials are also worried about it. Writes Helen Zille, former Cape Town mayor and premier of South Africa's Western Cape province, "The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?"

The National Geographic article makes that point again: "For months, citizens have been urged to consume less, but more than half of residents ignored those volunteer restrictions."

Says David Olivier, a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, "The fundamental problem is the kind of lifestyle we're living. There's almost a sense of entitlement that we have a right to consume as much as we want. The attitude and reaction of most posts on social media is indignation. It's 'we pay our taxes' and therefore we should be as comfortable as possible.”

"A sense of entitlement." Sound familiar?

Finally, many major cities are in roughly the same shape as Cape Town, are staring down the barrel of the same gun (emphasis added):

[M]any of the 21 million residents of Mexico City only have running water part of the day, while one in five get just a few hours from their taps a week. Several major cities in India don't have enough. Water managers in Melbourne, Australia, reported last summer that they could run out of water in little more than a decade. Jakarta is running so dry that the city is sinking faster than seas are rising, as residents suck up groundwater from below the surface.

Much like Cape Town's fiasco, reservoirs in Sao Paulo, Brazil, dropped so low in 2015 that pipes drew in mud, emergency water trucks were looted, and the flow of water to taps in many homes was cut to just a few hours twice a week. Only last-minute rains prevented Brazilian authorities from having to close taps completely.

"Sao Paulo was down to less than 20 days of water supply," says Betsy Otto, director of the global water program at the World Resources Institute. "What we're starting to see are the confluence of a lot of factors that might be underappreciated, ignored, or changing. Brought together, though, they create the perfect storm."

Is it an emergency yet? Is this impetus enough? Is it time yet for people to take matters into their own hands and act?

Tick tick tick says the world-historical clock on the wall. Tick tick tick.

GP
 

In April 2018 Cape Town, South Africa, Could Become the First Major City to Run Entirely Out of Water

Roadside sign in Cape Town, South Africa, from February 2017 (source)

by Gaius Publius

In Cape Town, South Africa, they're calling it the day the water taps could be turned off. They're also calling it, not an impending crisis, but a "deep deep deep" crisis now.

It's also a vision, perhaps, of the future of California and the American Southwest. Is it time yet to take this matter seriously? Or is the writing on the wall not yet visible enough for people to rebel against their political leaders and act?

The drama is unfolding before us, with South Africa leading the way.

Cape Town Is Running Out of Water

I write this in February 2018. On April 29, 2018, even under strict water rationing, Cape Town could become the first major city in the world to entirely run out of water. This story comes from the AccuWeather website, but we could have taken it from several other sources.

First, the extent of current water rationing:

As the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1, residents of Cape Town, South Africa, ushered in 2018 — the start of a new year and the start of the city’s stringent new water regulations.

The Level 6 restrictions came into effect to combat an unprecedented drought which threatens to make Cape Town the first major city devoid of water.

The slew of new measures include limiting individuals municipal water usage per day and threatening to impose fines on those who exceed it.

They also reduce agricultural water use by 60 percent and commercial use by 45 percent, compared to pre-drought allocations.

California was given a brief reprieve from its own years-long drought by the recent El Niño of 2015-2016, but dry conditions there are now back and the water table has already fallen drastically, as much as 50 feet under the crop-growing Central Valley.

"In some parts of the Central Valley, water tables have fallen 50 feet or more in the past five years, prompting wells to stop producing and even land to sink, dragging down roads and bridges," wrote the SF Chronicle at the start of 2016. "The collapsed aquifers in many cases can’t be resurrected to store water — or at least store as much as they did in the past."

Though new Central Valley aquifers have recently been found, they too will be emptied if the ongoing drought isn't reversed, and a virtual flood of new, usable water isn't added. Absent the years-long drought becoming a years-long recovery, the trajectory for water in California hasn't changed. After all, even absent anthropogenic global warming, the American Southwest has already seen droughts lasting more than a generation.

What Cape Town is seeing now, Californians could very well see before the next decade ends. (For a look at the structural problems with water in California and the American Southwest, read "California Drought, the "Bigger Water Crisis" & the Consumer Economy.")

Americans, and in particular Californians, should therefore consider the following as a real-life preview. Note that the El Niño that brought water to California brought drought to South Africa:

The drought and water stress across most of South Africa follows a strong El Niño in 2015 and 2016.

The weather pattern — characterized by warmer-than-normal ocean water in the equatorial Pacific — resulted in extreme heat and spells of dry weather.

Beneficial rain eventually returned in late fall for much of the country, including the drought-stricken western Cape.

But according to the South Africa Water and Sanitation Department, it failed to restore the water supply in the country’s dams.

Which leaves them where, exactly?

As of Dec. 18, the combined level of dams supplying the city was at a mere 31 percent of capacity.

At the current rate of consumption, officials warn April 29, 2018 will become Day Zero, the day the city’s taps will be turned off.

“The city of Cape Town could conceivably become the first major city in the world to run out of water, and that could happen in the next four months,” Dr. Anthony Turton, professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, told the New York Times.

“It’s not an impending crisis — we’re deep, deep, deep in crisis,” he said.

"At the current rate of consumption" means after current restrictions on water use are accounted for. Absent new water from somewhere, and a lot of it, it would seem the writing is on the wall for Cape Town.

Two Bottom Lines

There's a short-term problem here, and a long-term one.

The article addresses the short-term problem starkly. First, rationing involves trust and voluntary measures, like flushing the toilet much less frequently, and not everyone trusts that if they do their part, including going the "extra mile" in restraint, their neighbors will do the same. This creates social tensions that, as the crisis deepens, will inevitably become political problems as well.

Translate that to a California context and as we've noted many times, a kind of real war could erupt between farmers (and the hedge funds that increasingly own California farming estates), who feel that water is their due, and city dwellers, who greatly outnumber them. When it finally dawns on Californians that the writing is indeed on the wall for a near-term crisis — as it is for Cape Town — those conflicts will become, as noted, a kind of real war.

Second, Cape Town has a short-term problem that Californians may avoid. Cape Town, as a city, is a tourist destination, and derives almost 10% of its revenue from tourism. As Cape Town resident and travel blogger Kerry Kopke told AccuWeather: “[T]hink about it. If you were coming on a holiday to an amazing international destination, having spent thousands of dollars of your hard-earned money to get there, would you really want to stand in a shower for two minutes with a bucket under you and use that bucket to flush the toilet?”

The answer is obviously No. Either tourism will, excuse the metaphor, dry up, or tourists will ignore the restrictions. Or both. 

As to the long-term problem, it's simply this: Sometime in 2018 Cape Town may run completely out of water. What then?

As you ponder the answer to that question, consider this as not just a water problem, but a real estate problem as well. At some point, if not this year then in a year coming soon, Cape Town may be a ghost town. Who will live in a city that runs out of water?

And as people flee, its former residents will have lost much of what they've invested in their homes and businesses, if not all of it. And worse — barring debt relief from the kind hearts of their bankers, their mortgage debt will emigrate with them.

Does insurance cover that? Can government even begin to repair the damage?

Now translate that picture to much of the state of California, the part served by the Colorado River. It's not just a town-sized problem we're talking about. And when the inevitable political conflicts come, they won't be town-sized either.

GP
  

ZUPTA-- The Ugly Politics Of South Africa

Everyone knows who Nelson Mandela was-- not "everyone," but all normal, aware people who didn't vote for Trump. The 1984 Specials song, top 10 throughout Europe but barely top 100 in the U.S. (although #1 on alternative stations like KUSF where I was a dj at the time) helped, of course. Listen to it; it holds up. Nelson Mandela was the world's pre-eminent anti-apartheid hero; he served 27 years in prison before becoming South Africa's first democratically-elected president (1994), and is widely considered the George Washington of South Africa. The far right-- in South Africa and in the U.S.-- labeled him a Commie but he is better known as a beloved Nobel Peace Prize laureate. However, few in the U.S. know anything about South Africa's politics post-Mandela, who retired from the presidency in 1999. His successor was the always controversial Thabo Mbeki, who resigned in 2008. The following year Jacob Zuma (JZ) was elected president. Despite an incredibly corruption-scared administration, he's still president today, and still surrounded by gangsters enriching themselves-- and Zuma-- at the expense of the country.

And that brings us to today, where calls for Zuma's resignation (or impeachment) are constant and deafening. Largely due to the corruption and political turmoil, the country's bonds are rated as "junk." Zumba is a racist, a homophobe, unimaginably crooked, more than a little authoritarian... and a polygamist with 6 wives.

Over the weekend, The Guardian's Simon Tisdall wondered if Zuma's political foes have finally found the means to topple him. Now we're going to meet some new characters, the Gupta family. Tomorrow the South African parliament will hold a vote of no confidence as "persistent allegations of corruption, nepotism and abuse of power may finally be catching up with him." If there's a secret ballot tomorrow-- a possibility-- he'll probably lose the vote.

[Zuma's] ANC holds 249 of the parliament’s 400 seats. The opposition, principally composed of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), will need 50 ANC defectors for a majority. A revolt on such a scale would once have been thought inconceivable in a party whose post-apartheid watchword is unity. But extra-parliamentary pressure for change is intense and growing.

Major street demonstrations are planned in Cape Town this week. A petition signed by more than a million people demanding Zuma’s removal has been presented to Cyril Ramaphosa, the deputy president, by the DA leader, Mmusi Maimane.

“South Africans from all walks of life have stood up together and said, ‘Look, we have got to a point now where we must ask Ramaphosa to do the right thing’,” Maimane said. “The question is, what is he going to do?”

The answer could determine who, sooner or later, succeeds Zuma as ANC leader and president of South Africa. Regardless of what happens in parliament, the ANC is due to meet in December to select an heir. Ramaphosa is one candidate. Other possibles are Lindiwe Sisulu, Jeff Radebe, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Zweli Mkhize, Mathews Phosa-- and speaker Mbete. The extent of the line-up indicates how divided the ANC has become.

Both Ramaphosa and Sisulu, the presumed frontrunners, face a dilemma. They have repeatedly condemned Zuma-era factionalism, looting and so-called “state capture” – self-interested influence exercised by private businesses and individuals over state policy-making. But if Zuma falls, the main raison d’etre of their campaigns will fall with him.

The Spear by Brett Murray

And there is another problem: if Ramaphosa or the other presidential hopefuls back the parliamentary revolt, they will doubtless be lauded by the opposition. But many ANC members, who will choose Zuma’s successor in December (or sooner), may condemn them as traitors. Zuma supporters thus have reason to hope he will survive this no-confidence vote, as he has five others. Ramaphosa, who has been officially endorsed by Cosatu, the powerful trade union federation, has continued to argue that remaining silent about wrongdoing by the state and within the ANC amounts to a “betrayal of the struggle”. “The ANC is your ANC. It belongs to you... Nothing should stop you [from speaking out],” Ramaphosa told a Cosatu conference in May.

The opposition also includes high-profile individuals with no stated interest in the presidential succession, such as Pravin Gordhan, the former finance minister sacked by Zuma in March. Gordhan warned recently that state capture was crippling the country’s economy. If South Africans allowed the rot to continue, he said, “we are going to slump into a 10-year disaster.”

Much of the controversy over state capture centers on the relationship between Zuma and the wealthy Gupta business family, and alleged bribes and kickbacks associated with government contracts. Speaking to the BBC, Atal Gupta said the claims, including those made by Ramaphosa, were based on misunderstandings and misinformation, and denied any wrongdoing.

Controversy has also arisen over social media work undertaken by the British PR firm Bell Pottinger to defend Gupta businesses against the allegations. CEO James Henderson has admitted his company’s approach had been naive, but denied any intention to fuel racial tensions through use of terms such as “economic apartheid” and “white monopoly capital” (which Zuma has claimed lay behind calls for his resignation).

State capture has become a metaphor for the wider political and economic ills afflicting South African society. In a damning independent report last May, entitled Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa Is Being Stolen, researchers from the universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Stellenbosch, funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, accused “Zuma Inc” of turning the country into a mafia-style fiefdom.

It stated: “Commentators, opposition groups and ordinary South Africans underestimate Jacob Zuma, not simply because he is more brazen, wily and brutal than they expect but because they reduce him to caricature.” In reality, the report said, Zuma had presided over a concerted political project to repurpose state institutions to channel money to his cronies in a shadowy elite.

The report called on South Africans of all backgrounds to “defend the founding promise of democracy… by doing all that is necessary to stop the systemic and institutionalised process of betrayal.”

The no-confidence motion comes against a backdrop of increased disillusionment with the ANC, as evidenced by last year’s local elections, when the DA and EFF made significant gains. While Zuma’s unpopularity is undoubtedly to blame, so too is South Africa’s worsening economic performance.

Comparing South Africa with other emerging countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2017 survey makes alarming reading. Growth has declined sharply since 2011, it said, partly because of electricity shortages, falling commodity prices and policy uncertainty. Unemployment is up, at 27%, while youth unemployment was 53% in 2016.

Low-quality education, high crime rates, healthcare deficiencies and violence against women are cited as continuing problems. A third of South Africans live on or below the poverty line, the survey found. And more than a quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, inequality remains stark, with the top fifth of the population earning 40 times more than the lowest.

Writing for Bloomberg last week, Ana Monteiro explained the Gupta family for U.S. readers. Keep in mind, Gupta lies as easily (and believably) as Trump and it's likely that everything he ever says is as true as what Trump says.

A raft of emails leaked to South African media about how the Gupta family have won billions of rands of contracts from state-owned companies and influenced government decisions through their closeness to President Jacob Zuma isn’t authentic, family member Atul Gupta said.

“There’s no authenticity of Gupta Leaks at all,” Gupta told the British Broadcasting Corp. in an interview. There is every-day “perception-mongering to drive their own agenda,” he said.

Companies controlled by the Gupta family, who are friends with Zuma and in business with his son, were dropped by their South African bankers, brokers and auditors, and the nation’s graft ombudsman implied that the president allowed the family to influence cabinet appointments and the issuing of state contracts. Zuma and the Guptas deny the allegations.

News organizations, including the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, have reported that they have as many as 200,000 emails they say expose dealings by the family showing influence over the government and state companies.

Public-relations firm Bell Pottinger LLP [another criminal outfit, steep in rich-people entitlement and corruption and refusing to act until they were forced to] ended its relationship with the Guptas’ Oakbay Resources and Energy Ltd. and in July said it had hired the law firm Smith Herbert Freehills LLP to probe its work for Oakbay. It fired a partner and suspended three other employees after a preliminary investigation into its work for the Gupta family exposed “inappropriate and offensive” activities, it said.

The Democratic Alliance, the biggest opposition party, accused Bell Pottinger of pushing “white monopoly capital,” a term used by politicians including Zuma and members of the Black First Land First movement, as the main cause of inequality in the country. At its July conference, the ruling African National Congress rejected demonizing the concept as the primary driver of the country’s problems -- a setback for the faction that supports Zuma’s favored candidate, his ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him as the party’s leader in December.

“White monopoly capital, if you go research any revolutionary speech in this country, always exist, meaning I don’t know where this term comes from, believe me,” Gupta told the BBC. “I don’t think it belongs to any of our professional advisers. I will be shocked. They are very credible people, I believe they should not do anything like that. Neither us nor them.”

Bell Pottinger is Britain's biggest PR firm-- the top execs all get knighted and they're basically the scum of the earth-- and is on the verge of collapse over the Zuma-Gupta (Zupta) scandal. Bell Pottinger's founder, Lord Tim Bell, quit in disgust last year after the company refused to get out of bed with the Guptas. They now stand accused of running a racist Fake News social media campaign on behalf of the Guptas to help Zuma. Several of the culprits, including partner Victoria Geoghegan, were fired. Bell Pottinger has had experience in this area since the Bush regime hired them to do the same thing in the context of the Iraq War.

Bell Pottinger CEO James Henderson, who had previously denied any wrongdoing by his company, was put on the spot on today’s BBC Radio World at One by reporter Manveen Rana who skewered him for the company’s dubious choice of clients and activity in this campaign (Henderson didn’t do that badly, considering he was standing on one leg).

Unfortunately for him just about every utterance was contradicted by Bell who claimed he’d warned the company off the Gupta brothers but his advice had been ignored.

Bell, who’s famously said on many occasions that his (then) company would represent anyone (past and present clients include Chilean dictator General Pinochet, Bahrain and, according to its Wikipedia entry anyway, Rolf Harris) sidestepped the question of ethics by pointing out that the campaign for the Gupta brothers’ Oakbay company had cost Bell Pottinger valuable clients including Investec and South Africa’s Richemont, which owns Cartier and Dunhill among others.

Bell Pottinger has always sailed close to the wind but had cover from the outspoken and proudly libertarian Bell who’s view was that PR companies were like criminal barristers, you took on the brief if the client could pay.

The rather more conventional Henderson now has to fight the Bell corner-- with Bell in the other one.

Watch this incredible program on two videos, which was played this weekend on NPR and has made Americans aware of the scandal roiling South Africa: