Alexandra residents take the World Bank to task over plans to expand the Lesotho Highlands Water Project
We are a group of low-income residents of Alexandra township, near Sandton. We have filed a formal protest at the World Bank Inspection Panel – the equivalent of its auditor general – against the expansion of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project.
The reason is that the next dam – Mohale, the proposed R6,7-billion dam known as Phase 1B – will cost Gauteng residents too much money and prevent us from engaging in urgently needed water conservation. World Bank executive directors were scheduled to vote this week on a $50-million loan for the project.
It is regrettable that our identity must remain secret. The reason is intimidation experienced by opponents of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. Community leaders from Soweto and Alexandra have withdrawn their original claim to the panel, leaving ordinary residents to file anonymously.
World Bank staff have responded inadequately to our concerns. Last month they filed a report advising against a delay, making the assumption of at least a 3,3% annual water demand increase in Gauteng. But an official of Rand Water has been quoted as saying that 40% reductions are possible, leading to a long delay in the Mohale dam – perhaps 20 years – with savings of R800-million a year.
With such great sums at stake, calculations must be scientific. In the mid-1980s, when the water project got off the ground, the bank estimated 40% higher water demand than actually occurred, its new report admits.
The bank’s report still downplays the urgent need to rectify the existing maldistribution of water resources. By consuming less than 2% of all South Africa’s water, black township residents together drink less than a third of the amount used in middle-income and upper- income swimming pools and gardens, not to mention the huge waste by farmers who have had enormous irrigation subsidies over the years and who use 50% of South Africa’s water.
In the wake of January’s embarrassment when the initial wave of Lesotho water had to be turned back because the Vaal system was already overflowing, there remains intense debate over whether Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Kader Asmal’s alternative options should not, perhaps, first be given a chance to work.
The simple question is: if our society decides it can and must conserve water, at the same time meeting all our citizens’ most basic needs regardless of ability to pay, do we need this dam?
The bank says we must proceed, but in a manner we are convinced is hasty, ill- informed and lacking in South African values. Given the bank’s previous dismal record on this dam and other large projects, and given that studies of conservation and other demand side measures are still many months from completion, the loan decision should be delayed.
We are requesting that the inspection panel slow down the process and do more careful research, in a manner consistent with our society’s commitment to transformation. Bank staff have to be taught to take community views seriously, and carry out studies on basic household needs and demand management, instead of rushing ahead with a costly megaproject.
How expensive is the Mohale dam water? If Asmal’s department and Rand Water must pay off R6,7-billion in capital costs, the price of each new drop of water we drink in Gauteng increases by obscene amounts.
According to the World Bank itself, a cubic metre of water from the Vaal Dam costs 8c, from Bloemhof 10c, from Tugela Vaal 21c and from the combination of Lesotho’s Katse (complete) and Mohale (the proposed dam) a staggering R1,50. The bank tells Asmal it would be “economically appropriate” to raise the price of raw Vaal water from 30c to R1,50 per cubic metre.
Unfortunately, Katse is water under the bridge. The three other projects provide Gauteng with 2,3-billion cubic metres a year, while the two Lesotho dams together would add just another billion. Surely we can find ways to cut back so as to avoid Mohale for some years?
As the bank task manager himself admitted in an internal memo last October, “All of this shows that if demand management had been on the table in 1986 at the time of the treaty negotiation, and if the commitment to [Phase] 1B had not been made on the terms it was, then the whole story would be different. Lesson: push the demand-management stuff.”
But now, just before a major lending decision is made, and without further studies on demand management, the same bank staffer says the opposite: push the loan.
What is most disturbing is that the bank did its initial calculations hand-in-hand with apartheid-era bureaucrats. The bureaucrats and bank experts never thought to look into how much water is needlessly wasted, through no fault of ours, in Alex and other Gauteng townships.
We remain furious that apartheid-era infrastructure has not been fixed, and that out of every 100 drops that flow through Gauteng pipes, 24 quickly leak into the ground through faulty bulk infrastructure (half of Soweto’s water leaks out).
There are still more drops falling from leaky communal and house taps. Visit the higher elevations of Alex, witness the perpetual lack of water pressure, and you will understand the scope of the problem.
Civic associations across Gauteng are taking advantage of any and all programmes to fix the mess. But, like all township development, this process has only just begun and the amount of money committed is a tiny fraction of that needed.
Asmal seems to favour a sensible pro- conservation approach that also ensures we have a lifeline supply, although the cost of water to millions of impoverished township residents is still too high. But here is the dilemma. If the bank loan, other offshore finance and local funding from taxpayers and the Development Bank of Southern Africa are finalised, the first casualty of higher costs is the government’s dual commitment to conserve water and to provide lifeline supplies. It is obvious that, with Rand Water requiring much greater consumption to mop up the flood of new water and to pay the huge forthcoming costs of Mohale, any incentive to conserve and to address basic equity will tend to evaporate.
The forthcoming Rand Water price increases – which were more than 50% above the inflation rate, because 75% of the increase is from the Lesotho Highlands Water Project – will hit us at a time when unemployment is increasing, overall municipal bills are being increased and some white ratepayers (our Sandton neighbours) are offering stiff resistance to paying their fair share.
Township residents are despondent that today, four years after our first democratic government was elected, we must still complain about the lack of change, the filth, the health hazards and the hygiene problems caused by inadequate water.
When Soweto civic members staged a protest march on Southern Johannesburg council in 1996, they were told that there was nothing that could be done about huge tariff increases, because these were the result of the first big Lesotho dam.
Both with respect to conservation and access to basic supply, our communities depart from the Washington advisers.
Bank staff have firmly opposed giving all South African citizens our universal, constitutionally guaranteed entitlement to water, preferring instead an administratively complex “means test”. They insist on a “credible threat of cutting service”, as if this was not a public health and personal safety risk. They oppose a lifeline tariff and rising block tariffs, because municipal privatisation “will be much harder to establish”.
Bank staff also tell Asmal to be “very careful about irrigation for ‘previously disadvantaged'” South Africans and that instead the “key lies in voluntary solutions – trading water rights”, as if emergent black farmers have a hope of competing financially with subsidised white commercial enterprises.
For the bank, the last resort is the threat of a drought. This we take seriously, but we have yet to be convinced that high- profile conservation and redistribution techniques – that can save more than a third of all water now consumed – won’t reduce the need for water restrictions.
So to the bank, we residents of Alexandra – and many other Gauteng consumers – say, thanks for the advice and the offer of loans, but no thanks!
The authors are residents of Alexandra township whose identities are known to the Mail & Guardian
ENDS