The black working class, the poor and unemployed would suffer through the installation of pre-paid water meters, the Community Initiative Development Forum (CIDF) prepared to tell the Johannesburg City Council on Tuesday.
”Water is not a privilege; it is a right — a right that we are prepared to continue fighting for,” the CIDF said in a memorandum.
Police said that about 1 000 residents of Soweto, Eldorado Park, Coronationville and Alexandra were marching to the Braamfontein offices of Johannesburg mayor Amos Masondo.
”[The] pre-paid water system has become the latest act by the ruling class to… maximise profits and implement cost recovery even… where the working class cannot afford services,” said the CIDF, formerly known as the Anti-Privatisation Forum.
”If it is a good thing to do, why not install them also in white residential areas?” it asked in a memorandum it intended handing to Masondo, under the banner of Organisations Against Prepaid Water.
Apart from anything else, the system posed a health hazard, it charged.
”The forced installation of pre-paid meters was directly responsible for the outbreak of cholera and other water-borne diseases in KwaZulu-Natal.”
Unable to afford water, women and children went back to collecting water from polluted sources.
The CIDF has accused the city council of ”arrogance and brutality” in ”forcefully” implementing the system against residents’ wishes with the ”complicity” of the police.
It is giving the council 10 days to respond to its demands for:
an immediate halt to the installation of the meters;
the right to free, clean water;
removal of the meters already installed;
a halt to the privatisation of water services; and
the cancellation of contracts with water multinationals.
”We reject the cost recovery approach, and demand its replacement with a public good approach which will mean that water should be treated as a right and a public good and not a privilege and a commodity,” the CIDF said.
It has also called for an immediate stop to government policies that they claim result in unemployment, water and electricity cut-offs and house evictions ”as these undermine the fundamental human rights stipulated in the Constitution”.
The Johannesburg City Council is expected to comment after receiving the memorandum. – Sapa