COMMENT Before Malaysia even realizes it Singapore will be looking lesser and lesser towards her for water.
Under the Republic’s ambitious self-sufficiency programme the city-state is gearing up to ramp supplies for domestic consumption.
That assurance is not only to assuage anxieties in Singapore but what former prime minister called “to stop the leveraging from Malaysian politicians”
There is no doubt the issue of continued water supplies to the Republic have long hung like the proverbial Sword of Damocles over the city-state’s head.
If past incidences are any clue, that became characteristically vivid in the aftermath of the Israeli state president Chaim Herzog’s visit in 1986 when angry Malaysian politicians continually harped on the use of water ‘gunboat’ diplomacy to level with Singapore.
Another 50 years remain before Singapore’s last and final treaty with Malaysia lapses in 2011.
And from the looks of all the bile that have creased and periodically strained ties, the self-sufficiency programme is just that bit to give ‘meaning to sovereignty’. As after the entire rational behind desalination plants and NEWATER was to tug the Republic away from the pulls that political expediency manifests through the issue of continued water supplies.
It also amounts to what a Republic keen in wanting to call its own soul just has to do. To not do is perhaps to place her at the continued mercy of nations who after clearly understanding her vulnerability just know what to expect through the use of the ‘water weapon’.
So it has to be. As with Israel and Turkey, Mexico and the United States or Hong Kong and China - the other nations in the world engaged in the water trade – the time has come for Singapore to strike a compromise.
And that ‘compromise’, accordingly, is no more than to achieve complete sufficiency.
It is true the Republic lacks what Malaysia has in abundance.
And it is also true that, that dependency though mutually beneficial to both parties in the beginning, will like a tempestuous love affair swing from exuberance to despondency or even sometimes to outright slanging matches.
A real strategic challenge
Just how much a ‘sacred commodity’ water is, is never graphically illustrated than what the Japanese in their quest to conquer Singapore did in 1942.
By turning off the taps they achieved a rather unique method in modern-day warfare: starve a local population enough to make these hapless people lose the will to fight.
It is unsurprising to the power and ‘influence’ water wields as a weapon.
And there is also no naysaying that Singapore is constantly vexed by threats and sometimes even of hints, such as that made by former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad in the late 1990s of raising the price of water sold to Singapore despite an existing agreement that it only be retailed for 3 sen per ton.
And so it is to be.
Feelers are already out that Singapore will not renew the remaining water agreement with Malaysia when it expires in 2061.
The city-state has not just built new water desalination and treatment plants. (There are five to date.) Complementing the plants are plans to increase raise water catchments (or reservoirs) to gargantuan scales such that total self-sufficiency is achieved over the next 50 years.
It is not just Malaysia and the need to be self-sufficient that is at the heart of the problem.
Climate change and its attendant effects on water production are causing such a premium that sufficient availability of water resources will over the years pose a real strategic challenge to the nation.
Yet there is no denying that the fervour with which the nation proceeds with developing alternative supplies may possibly turn the entire engineering process to emerge as a new industry by itself!
In other words, the invention born out of the necessity in Singapore may just be what the rest of the world wrestling with scant water resources adopt, perhaps one day even by Malaysia!
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