In June the Mail & Guardian ran a series of letters and articles that claimed the social movements and “radical academics” do not get their facts right.
Our research on water cut-offs was included in this criticism. In a 2002 book, Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery in South Africa, John Pape and I argued that at least 5,5-million people, and as many as 9,8-million people, had been affected by water cut-offs over a seven-year period from 1994 to 2001.
The criticisms of our work were based in large part on a press release by Mark Orkin, president of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), who claimed that our methodology was faulty and that we had “considerably over-estimated” the number of water cut-offs from a 2001 HSRC survey.
At no point did Orkin contact us to discuss the matter nor has he replied to repeated requests to review the data.
Officials from the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry requested an alternative survey on water cut-offs. This survey, conducted in mid-2003, has yet to be released to the public. It has, however, been used by Mike Muller, the department’s director general, to further deny our findings.
I have now — finally — seen the data from this 2003 survey. Far from contradicting our results, the Department of Water Affairs/HSRC data show that at least 1,18-million people had their water cut off between mid-2002 and mid-2003. This figure would likely have been much higher if not for the introduction of “free water” and a moratorium on cut-offs in many of the country’s largest municipalities in 2002. The data therefore supports our estimates of the total number of people affected by cut-offs between 1994 and 2001.
It gets worse, however. The survey excludes about 5,6-million people who had their water cut off last year but did not know why. Given that many households have large payment arrears, and that water bills can be very confusing, it is not unrealistic to assume that many of these homes were cut off for non-payment without realising it.
The figures also exclude about 5,2-million people who had their water service disrupted that year for maintenance or upgrades. Although clearly a valid reason for interrupting water supply, interviewees were not given a chance to say if they had also experienced a water cut-off for non-payment (an elementary error in survey design).
The estimates also exclude about 2,3-million people who were disconnected that year for less than one day. While not necessarily life-threatening, it is nevertheless another indication of the scale of the cut-off problem.
For those readers who find their heads spinning over this seemingly endless numerical debate there are, at least, some important lessons to be learned. The first — and hopefully positive — lesson is that research methodology must be taken seriously in all matters of public debate. Service cut-offs present a particularly tricky methodological challenge (there are different ways to try to get at the nature and scale of the problem) but as tedious and technocratic as it may seem it is critical to good policy-making.
Second, if we are to have a proper debate on important matters of public interest then public research bodies such as the HSRC must be more transparent, autonomous and accountable.
A third lesson is that the water affairs department — or any other government department for that matter — cannot be expected to monitor its own achievements. There should be broad-based, collaborative monitoring and evaluation systems that engage a wide range of state and civil society actors and which employ a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods. We made this proposal to the water affairs department last year and it was met positively at the time. Hopefully, we can restart this dialogue.
Finally, and in the interests of moving this particular debate forward, research on the impacts of cost recovery must also take into account the effects of pre-paid meters (which force people to cut themselves off), “trickler” valves (which limit the flow and amount of water), ground tanks and a host of other technologies designed to control people’s consumption of basic services.
These forms of water restriction are growing rapidly in South Africa but are completely absent from the survey.
The problem of water cut-offs has not gone away. It is, however, being transformed by a new set of cost recovery systems and technologies and it is to these research questions that we must now turn our keenest methodological eyes.
David McDonald is co-director of the Municipal Services Project. He is the editor, with Greg Ruiters, of The Age of Commodity: Water Privatisation in Southern Africa (Earthscan Press)