South Africa faces the prospect of segregated urban slums, where people are separated not by race but by the way the sewerage flows in post-apartheid cities, with social and environmental conditions worse than those created by the old government’s housing policies.
This hard-hitting argument is contained in a critique by the National Institute for Economic Policy (NIEP) of the government’s new programme to provide water, sanitation, roads and electricity to municipal areas that were severely neglected during the apartheid era.
NIEP, a think tank that advises organised labour and the civic movement on economic policy, argues that the Municipal Infrastructure Investment Framework (MIIF) currently being devised by the government reneges on pre-election promises to provide proper city services to all residents.
The proposal at the centre of the controversy is a plan to provide only “basic” services — communal taps, improved pit latrines or portable toilets, open stormwater drains and streetlights only — to urban households with a combined income of less than R800 a month, estimated at some 20% of the urban population.
The MIIF and the government’s Urban Development Strategy, both unveiled late last year, state that the scheme is based on harsh economic realities. The strategy aims to ensure that consumers pay for their municipal services so that government coffers are not drained by the heavy costs of providing water, roads and electricity to the poor.
NIEP says the new urban upgrading strategy, based on advice from various World Bank teams that visited the country in 1994 and 1995, offers urban victims of apartheid neglect far less than what was promised in the Reconstruction and Development Programme.
NIEP senior researcher Patrick Bond, who parodies the model as a “pit latrine approach to development”, says a small levy on big industrial users of water and electricity who currently enjoy among the cheapest rates in the world, would have allowed the government to finance the RDP’s alternative vision of adequate municipal infrastructure for all.
“The main reason that the `basic’ levels of service are being imposed on the vast majority of the urban poor is the allegedly high recurrent costs of water and electricity. In the absence of subsidies, these costs prohibit low-income households paying `economic’ [full cost recovery] rates for even a minimal monthly amount,” says Bond.
This cost-recovery approach, in line with the neo- liberal principles behind the government’s new macro-economic strategy, ignores the RDP’s promise to deliver to every urban household water-borne sewerage, an on-site supply of at least 50 litres of water to every house, and enough electricity to cover essential lighting, heating and cooking needs for a typical family.
“One of the most tragic legacies of apartheid was the extreme social and geographic segregation forced upon people of different races. Under the proposed system of infrastructure provision, such service provision will take the form of class differentiation according to service levels,” says Bond.
“Residential areas will be divided into those that have no sewage reticulation and only collective taps, dirt roads and no electricity, and those with better services. Under the proposed arrangement, there is no possibility for a low-income earner raising her or his standard of living and then upgrading their dwelling by installing water-borne sewage, since the entire residential area will be without the bulk infrastructure required.”
He adds the potential for leakage from pit latrines into the water table, pollution from burning coal for cooking, and intensified deforestation from wood being used as an energy source is increased by the government’s cost-recovery programme.
Labour productivity rates of industrial workers and the ability to start small businesses in the urban areas supplied with only basic services are also likely to be negatively affected by the proposed urban programme.
The Urban Development Strategy does provide for government aid in the form of limited subsidies and “lifeline” support for the most indigent households — but Bond says the level of poverty inherited from the past is so great that the tariff system needs to be restructured in order to obtain substantial subsidies from big users of electricity.
“If such a proposal had been considered and adopted, it would have been relatively easy to cross- subsidise from national-scale industrial, service- sector, mining and agricultural bulk users of water and electricity, to low-income residential consumers. The vast difference in use patterns would have meant a marginal increase in tariffs for the large users and lifeline service at no or nominal cost to low-income users.”
The MIIF, however, outlines the massive challenges involved in correcting the imbalance that the country has inherited in the delivery of municipal services. Four million urban people have access only to untreated water, eight million have minimal sanitation, 17-million have no access to electricity and eight million have no formal road access to their homes.
The cost of addressing these backlogs is estimated at between R60-billion and R70-billion over 10 years — but only if the level of services supplied is matched to the ability of households to afford the costs involved in maintaining, administering and supplying these services once the infrastructure is in place.
“While the recurrent costs are not included in the above figure, the need to cover such costs associated with this programme is central to the affordability analysis which requires that service levels are matched to predicted household income levels,” says the MIIF.
The affordability model used to determine government strategy predicts that 20% of all urban households will earn less than R800 a month over the next 10 years. As these families will only be able to pay between R35 and R50 a month, it will only be economically feasible to provide “basic” services to them. These include gravel roads, open drains, improved pit latrines, and communal water points.
The model predicts that 25% of households will earn between R800 and R1 700 a month, making it feasible to supply “intermediate” services in the form of taps in the yards of all homes, simple water-borne sanitation and pre-paid electricity metres in each house. Full services will be provided to an estimated 55% of the population who are expected to earn more than R3500 a month.
Bond says the prospect of a new form of post- apartheid segregation, a line that will be drawn across the country’s cities by the flow of the sewerage pipes, could be even worse than expected given that the number of families with an income of less than R800 a month is likely to be far greater than 20% of the urban population in 10 years’ time.
He warns: “It should be noted that the `basic’ services contemplated by government are not merely emergency services [piped water or portable toilets in slum settlements that are without water or hygienic facilities at present] but are more fundamentally, permanent development policy.”