crossfire
Anna Weekes
The Mail & Guardian published an article last week by the Director General of Water Affairs, Mike Muller, which hid several pertinent facts about what can only be described as a water crisis in South Africa (”We can work together”).
Muller’s article gave the impression that privatisation is not on the government’s agenda for rural areas. This is not true, as has been proved by the work of the Municipal Infrastructure Investment Unit, which moves around the country privatising municipal services such as water. Water has been privatised in rural, peri-urban and metropolitan areas in the country.
The cohorts of privatised water the cost-recovery system and the pre-paid meter are definitely on the government’s agenda for the rural poor. It is well known that the removal of free taps led to the cholera epidemic in the first place. Mainly as a build-up to privatisation, stringent cost-recovery measures are now in place all over the country. Water cut-offs for non-payment are the order of the day. Pre-paid water meters are being put into place at an alarming rate.
In Britain water disconnections have been banned since 1999 when the Water Industry Act came into law. This is something that Muller knows very well but chose not to share with the public. This legislation was introduced after it was discovered that the costs of basic services were falling disproportionately upon poor families. An official survey on family spending revealed that poor families were spending almost 10% of their income on water and energy whereas better-off families spent 2,8% on services.
Compare this to the South African situation. A poor family of eight surviving off one pension of R600 a month can be charged up to R200 for water alone that’s one third of their income, not to mention the rising cost of electricity. ”The direct effect of prepayment metering was to remove the awareness of disconnection by companies themselves and privatise that decision within the lives of the poorest households,” says Mark Drakeford of Cardiff University, Wales, writing for the British Journal of Law and Society.
In effect, the privatisation to a French multinational of water delivered to the rural and urban poor is no different to privatising the decision to pay exorbitant prices for water to a poverty-stricken household.
The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry must learn from international experience and introduce a law similar to the British Water Industry Act. It is futile to pretend that South Africa’s poor are not suffering immense hardship from being denied access to water. It is equally futile to respond to a raging 18-month-old epidemic of a 19th century disease through underspending the water budget and embarking on a chaotic programme of distributing miniscule amounts of Jik here and there in cholera areas.
It is not useful for the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry to complain that it feels hard done by every time water-lobby organisations criticise the African National Congress’s water-delivery programme. Nearly eight years after the elections there are still millions of people without water.
Organisations who want to see this change do not only complain about the government, but have long been campaigning for a minimum of 50 litres of free water a person a day. This is the minimum necessary to maintain health and hygiene, according to the World Health Organisation. The same organisations have offered to save cities money and conserve water by fixing water leaks. Suggestions have been made of a national cross-subsidisation system where everyone would get enough water to live.
When these suggestions are ignored and the government’s answer to the raging cholera epidemic (which was said to be under control long ago) is a bunch of pamphlets attached to a bar of soap, Muller and his colleagues should expect nothing but criticism.
Muller must also be challenged on his claim that free water has been in place for nearly a year, and that it is subsidised by those who use the most. There are many examples of municipalities that took a long time to implement free water. Lukhanji municipality in the Eastern Cape announced only in November last year that it was to start implementing free water, for example. This was one year after the promise was first made by all the political parties in the run-up to the elections. Wits University academics have suggested that about half the municipalities in the country do not yet have free water.
The cost of having a tap installed outside a shack in places like Mabopane and Nelspruit is unaffordable to the poor, and no tap means no water. Tens of thousands of water disconnections have taken place in poor communities in these cases, there is no free water at all.
Muller asserts that civil society is maintaining a ”deafening and surprising” silence over governmental policy debates affecting water, such as what the roles and functions of ”B” and ”C” municipalities should be. He asserts that civil society is not ensuring that the poor have a voice in these debates.
But it is patently clear to all that the ANC is spending our education, health, water and housing money on arms and apartheid debt interest payments instead. The poor do not need ”civil society” to realise this or to articulate it on their behalf. The poor themselves have taken action against the growth, employment and redistribution strategy policies water riots have become common countrywide.
In Tafelsig, Cape Town, police shot a five-year-old and a journalist while cutting off water this was front-page news. Citizens of Soweto burned their water arrears demand letters outside their councillors’ houses.
The elderly women of Chatsworth, Durban, were shot at and beaten by the police, and publicly reviled by city bureaucrats for their bid to prevent evictions and water cut-offs. The increasing mobilisation by communities across the country to demand enough water, jobs, housing and electricity in order to live decent lives can hardly be described as ”deafening silence”. It is the ANC government and officials like Muller who are failing to listen.
Anna Weekes is media officer for the South African Municipal Workers’ Union. This article is written in her personal capacity