This Week I Thought – 20 February 2026

This week I thought a lot about whether or not other people do. Or rather, whether or not they actually stop to think before reacting to things.

On Thursday Namwater issued a circular saying that due to electrical work at Von Bach Dam there would be an interruption of the water supply to Windhoek between 7:30 in the morning and some time in the afternoon on Friday and the next thing you know everyone was sharing on Facebook and there were WhatsApps being sent left, right, and centre warning anyone who cared to listen that Windhoek would have no water on Friday.

Granted it wasn’t helped by some media houses publishing social media posts saying exactly that (which is something I’ll get onto in just a little while), but the fact that so few people seemed capable of understanding that when they open the tap in their house it does not in fact connect directly to Von Bach but  rather goes through a series of treatment facilities and is stored in one of the numerous reservoirs spread across the city – not to mention that those reservoirs are also fed in part by water from the Windhoek aquifer and the WINGOC water treatment plant. Ergo any interruption in the supply of water from Von Bach would only result in reservoirs not being refilled and, while I am conscious of the fact that I am normally always the one encouraging everyone to save as much water as possible, it would take pretty much every tap in Windhoek being left open for the duration of the maintenance to even come close to running the reservoirs dry.

On to the media houses then; whether it is due to the juniorisation of the news room, the lack of editorial controls, the commercial pressures being put on news rooms and the pressure to ‘be first’, or the rise of algorithms and the need to be as sensational as possible in order to ‘be seen’, the media houses failed in their duty to verify information and not spread unnecessary panic. While everyone has a responsibility to think before they post information on social media or share things via Whatsapp (or other messaging apps) journalists, and even other people working for or at media houses, have so much more. Rather than stopping to think about it themselves, or even do the most basic journalism, the City of Windhoek had to issue their own statement explaining that the taps would not in fact run dry and Namwater had to issue a second statement explaining that they never said the taps would run dry, before the guilty media houses reported that information – publishing press releases is not journalism, and incorrectly reading press releases and publishing information based on that misreading is just sloppy!

In a somewhat ironic twist, after having spent a good amount of time trying to reassure Windhoek residents that they needn’t worry about their taps running dry, there was a burst pipe in Kleine Kuppe on Friday morning, which resulted in the entire neighborhood’s taps running dry. This had me then spending more time thinking about misreading and the way people react in the age of instant messaging and social media. It is understandable to be frustrated by bust pipes (especially if you live in Kleine Kuppe, which seems to experience them more than other neighbourhoods) but watching the way people react to things always makes me chuckle. There are those who just want reassurance, those who try to be as helpful as possible, those who seem to expect someone else to solve all their problems, and those who seem to spend their time screaming into the void – shouting out their complaints loudly but never addressing them to the people or entities that could actually do something about them.

Perhaps they just need somewhere to get things off their chest and in the days of social media that place is a Whatsapp group, and perhaps for me it’s a weekly blog post on the Nova website speaking about just some of the many things I’ve thought about this week.