Last year, after a battle spanning many months and after I threatened legal action, Johannesburg Water (JW) finally provided me with a copy of the five-year management contract it had signed with the Johannesburg Water Management Company (Jowam), an international consortium of private water providers.
Jowam is almost wholly owned by the Paris-based Suez Group. Suez has been convicted of bribing municipal politicians elsewhere, and a subsidiary is involved in the Lesotho dam corruption scandal.
Suez makes its money by selling water and has often imposed high tariffs, delivered poor services and made huge profits at the expense of ordinary water consumers.
In 2001 Water Services South Africa (WSSA), a partial Suez subsidiary, was expelled from the Nkonkobe municipality, formerly Fort Beaufort, by its mayor following allegations of overcharging and poor services. WSSA did not contest the expulsion.
My interest is academic and political. I was registered at Wits University to research Johannesburg’s decision to corporatise water and sanitation services by forming JW, a private company, registered under the Companies Act. As part of the iGoli 2002 plan, the municipality stopped directly providing the services and instead licensed JW to do so.
Although JW has a public mandate to deliver these services it is a private-public hybrid with a foot in both the private and public sectors.
The company had earlier refused to provide the unions with the contract on the grounds that it was private and confidential and not for public access because it was an agreement between two private companies. However, faced with my Promotion of Access to Information Act requests last August they provided me with the contract on the last day of the 30-day waiting period.
Apparently, I had become the first person — outside of the parties involved — to get a copy of the contract. Precedent-setting as this was, it was not the only information I required.
Further requests for information — including for the crucial Suez bid for the contract (in which the company spells out its business plans in detail) — were denied on the grounds that it was private and confidential. JW has stated that the bid contained technical and commercial information that might be exploited by competitors.
Every time I was denied information the private side of JW was emphasised as a convenient covering rationale to withhold information. The public — consumers of water and broad civil society, including the unions organised at the water company — have no say in deliberations about what information will be allowed and disallowed. The board of JW decides.
Given the background of corruption by Suez — including in France itself — I believe that public access to the Suez bid is important so as to lay to rest any suspicion that there may have been impropriety and assure the public that they won the bid fairly.
Suez flew Johannesburg councillors to Buenos Aires to view the ”success” of what was its prize project — but has subsequently fled its Argentine contract.
Such information is important for us to understand what Suez promised to achieve in Johannesburg during the contract, which could be extended in 2006. Withholding the information prevents public scrutiny of the secret bidding process.
Suez and the City of Johannesburg appear to be violating the basic tenets of a democracy in which our government commits itself to transparency and accountability.
At a time when cholera outbreaks continue, chronic diarrhoea threatens about 26% of the adult population with full-blown Aids, water cut-offs are rampant and shallow sewers and pit latrines are the norm in poor areas — information about services, as vital to the public as water and sanitation, cannot be kept secret and denied on the grounds of commercial privacy.
The highly political nature of such services in poor areas and the serious limits placed on information is beyond doubt.
Besides the importance of access to information for researchers, the broad public must have the right to access any information about water and sanitation services.
Included in the information denied me was a shareholder agreement between Jowam and six black economic empowerment companies and ”internal reports” on a controversial prepaid water meter pilot project in Orange Farm (subject of a recent front-page New York Times story).
Several requests for assistance made to mayor Amos Masondo’s office were fruitless. Despite his claimed commitment to the principle of transparent governance, he failed or refused to intervene.
Apparently, although the City of Johannesburg is the sole shareholder of JW, its status as a private company, contracted to a multinational corporate consortium, prevents municipal officials from helping citizens acquire such vital information.
This violation of my right to know and to assist Johannesburg’s residents understand why the city’s water system is gaining international notoriety, appears the inevitable result of commercialisation and partial privatisation.
Information is also effectively privatised. It shows conclusively that the pledge made during the iGoli 2002 debates — to assuage fears of the critics of privatisation — that the City of Johannesburg will remain the political authority and sole shareholder means little.
The Freedom of Expression Institute has taken up the matter on my behalf. Having exhausted the information Act’s procedures we are taking this case to either the high court or the Constitutional Court for adjudication, the first of its kind to test the freedom of information legislation.
The implications of the case can be compared with the Treatment Action Campaign’s successful precedent-setting case against the government, compelling it to take steps to reduce the incidence of mother-to-child transmission of HIV/Aids.
Ebrahim Harvey is a former Mail & Guardian columnist. He is currently doing his master’s at Wits University.