Privatisation threatens to become an instrument of exclusion for the poor, writes Bryan Rostron
Despite vociferous complaints from business leaders that privatisation proceeds at a snail’s pace, it is remarkable how much of daily life here is effectively privatised.
You see it in the implausible spider-webs of electricity lines that criss-cross the dusty, impoverished streets of Khayelitsha, where one legal connection illicitly supplies perhaps a dozen other households. In affluent suburbs, private security cars patrol round the clock, replacing an under-funded, demoralised police force. In townships, desperate citizens also increasingly resort to privatised justice: vigilante lynchings and executions.
And while it is true that there has been little outright formal privatisation, there has been a great deal of variants on the theme, from ”restructuring” and ”corporatisation” to public-private partnerships. This creeping privatisation has occurred mostly and most controversially in the provision of public services, such as water and electricity.
This municipal drive for profitability has led to a massive social crisis. Last year in Soweto up to 20 000 homes a month were having their electricity disconnected for non-payment. Since 1999, in Cape Town, more than 100 000 households have had water cut off. This makes a mockery of the government’s promises to supply a basic minimum of free water and electricity: increasingly, the very poor are simply being disconnected.
Privatisation, for the very poor, threatens to become the new apartheid: an instrument of exclusion, not just from a better life, but even the very basics.
Poor communities are beginning to organise themselves to fight back. One prominent academic describes these township groups as ”Robin Hood organisations”. In Soweto moonlighting electricians immediately illegally reconnect cut-off families to the grid. On the Cape Flats there have been riots over water disconnections.
Privatisation may yet provoke the most explosive political threat, post-1994: grassroots movements, ironically reminiscent of the anti-apartheid ”civics”, organising to defend the same people against the ravages of a profit-driven democracy.
It is just such an irony that led to the devastating outbreak of cholera in KwaZulu-Natal. Eighteen months ago the provincial government began charging rural residents for water that had previously been free. Thousands of households could not afford the R51 connection fee and provision charges, so instead began using river water. Within weeks cholera broke out. To date this has caused more than 250 deaths.
While the African National Congress can claim great credit for providing new services to the previously disenfranchised three million households with clean drinking water, two and a half million connected to the national power grid these very gains are now under threat by privatisation in all its forms.
For example, Telkom (already 30% privately owned) recently admitted that of 621 219 new telephones installed last year, more than a third were later disconnected. Telkom claims that it is permitted to include these terminations as part of its overall growth.
”This emphasis on cost recovery, with services being outsourced, means not only job losses, but disconnections of basic services and eviction of people from their homes,” says Trevor Ngwane, a former ANC municipal councillor, now of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee.
”This neo-liberal economic approach carries a high price. The ANC is rapidly losing support. Their saving grace is that for now there is no alternative.
”But all these volunteer groups around the country, formed to fight against service cuts, are beginning to get together and unite. The mood in poor areas, frankly, is angry.
”People are saying that the ANC is like those migrant workers of the old apartheid days who had to leave their homes to go and work in the city, where they were dazzled by the bright lights, often found a new woman … and simply forgot their rural family.”
The ANC is keen to be seen to follow Washcon (Washington Consensus) economic policies. There is a hefty push from Western governments as well as institutions like the World Bank to ”liberalise” the economy.
”The pressure,” says the civil servant in charge of privatisation for another, poorer southern African country, ”is intense”.
But with communist and union allies part of his government, President Thabo Mbeki has had to perform a delicate tightrope act. With the same pragmatism (or sense of humour) that saw Mbeki appoint a pacifist as deputy defence minister, the president has ensured that ministers most responsible for privatisation are senior members of the South African Communist Party, including Jeff Radebe, who as Minister of Public Enterprises, is effectively minister for privatisation.
These communist ministers have led the assault on union strikes and left-wing objections to privatisation with tirades about ”counter-revolutionaries”, ”ultra-leftists”, ”playing to right-wing agendas” and ”plots”. Jeff Radebe even described the grassroots Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee as ”gangs of criminals” that must be dealt with. Privatisation here, it seems, may be driven through by Stalinist rhetoric.
The most notorious privatisation involves the British company Biwater.
In 1999 Biwater was granted a 30-year contract for water provision in Nelspruit. The company has been dogged by controversy ever since. Last month Biwater was slammed by a visiting delegation from the British public sector trade union, Unison.
Biwater has been accused of huge tariff hikes, up to 100%, and dwindling services, with water available only a few hours a day in some areas. The Unison delegation expressed deep shock at the misery caused by the dismal water provision they witnessed in poor satellite townships around Nelspruit. At the Clau-Clau health clinic they found no water at all. At Zwelitsha, nurse Mamsy Masuku said that while her clinic had water, the surrounding community had been cut off for four days.
”There is constant pressure on people to store water in whatever containers they can find,” Mamsy Masuku told the visiting trade unionists. ”It is common to find an entire family living off 10 litres of water over one or two days.” Masuku also reported an increase in diseases like diarrhoea since the privatisation of water.
The World Bank in particular has lobbied hard for the participation of private companies in water provision. Yet the Unison delegation said they found little evidence of satisfactory health and safety regulations employed by privatised water companies here, and claimed that the water cut-offs would be illegal in Britain.
It is also a commonplace that privatised companies the world over are likely to pay more attention, and devote more resources, to wealthy areas which, in South Africa, still often means white areas.
In changing its policy to one of privatisation, the ANC decided against a ”big bang” approach in favour of ”managed liberalisation”. But so far the government’s hesitant approach has led many businessmen to throw up their hands in frustration.
”The tragedy here is that there’s been a lot promised, little delivered,” says the disillusioned British representative of a major multinational asset management company. ”Investors who would have been interested a year ago have simply lost heart and are now looking elsewhere. The impression is that the government is dragging its feet, so the market will simply let South Africa drop off the potential investment radar screen.”
Proponents of privatisation claim it is the only way to attract foreign investment, spread wealth, create employment and encourage ”black economic empowerment”. This view simply ignores the fact that the majority of South Africans live outside the formal economy, and become increasingly marginalised by the pure drive for profit.
”What we are seeing now is a class apartheid,” says Patrick Bond of the Graduate School of Public and Development Management at Wits. Bond is also codirector of the Municipal Services Project, which examines the restructuring of municipal services. He points out that an estimated 85% of the rural population and 31% of the urban population are without adequate sewerage or sanitation.
”The problem with privatisation is that there is no connection between the ‘public good’ and ‘economic good’, hence there are promises of free water and electricity, but it is only available to those connected to the grid and whole areas of poor townships are being cut off,” says Bond. ”We are also seeing forced evictions and removals.
”These communities have no services and no connections. This means, effectively, that such places become low-income ghettos for ever. The logic of the private city is one of fragmentation. This is creating a form of geographical apartheid.”
The push to join planet privatisation, however hesitant, carries a high price and could yet prove the flashpoint for a new, volatile social upheaval in South Africa.
Bryan Rostron is a South African journalist, once again resident in this country after working for many years on national newspapers in Britain