WHOSE HAND ON THE TAP? WATER PRIVATIZATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
By Bob Carty, CBC Radio, 9 February 2003
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When apartheid ended, the new government launched a campaign to provide more water taps. But it also embraced a free-enterprise model for charging people, even poor people, for water. That has provoked outrage and anger. It has also brought death.
As CBC Radio producer Bob Carty discovered, the South Africa experience with water raises questions about whether the market is the best path towards sustainable development.
In the eastern South African state of Kwazulu-Natal, there's a massive aerial migration every late afternoon. Thousands of black birds leave the shores of the Indian Ocean just south of the border with Mozambique. They fly inland about 30 kilometres, and for some reason congregate in one large tree to serenade the sunset.
At the end of each day in Ngwelezane, a partly rural slum of the city of Empangeni, there are human migrations as well. Men with lunch buckets get off noisy buses. Women carry baskets of fruit and vegetables back from the market. Children and their mothers make the trek from their tin and cinderblock homes to a water standpipe.
"They're filling up quite large buckets which they call 'ee-go-go-go,' which are 25 or 30 litres," says David Hemson, a field researcher with the government's Human Science Research Council. Hemson chats, part in English, part in Zulu, with the women and young girls waiting for their plastic containers to slowly fill up with water from a brand new stand-pipe.
"It's pretty heavy if you are going to be walking more than 200 metres. Quite an exhausting task for the women and the younger women as well."
- David Hemson: "Bob, you should pick up 25 litres and put it on your head and just see what if feels like."
CBC's Bob Carty: "It's a good heft isn't it?"
David Hemson: "See if you can get it up on your head and see how far you can walk."
CBC's Bob Carty: "That's 25 litres?"
David Hemson: "That's 25 kilograms, roughly."
CBC's Bob Carty: "So 50 some-odd pounds. On your head?"
David Hemson: "On your head."
No way, I can't even get the bucket above my shoulders. Meanwhile, a ten-year old girl beside me, with a little help from a friend, gets one of the go-go-gos on her head. The other child has a wheelbarrow with three buckets of water that are probably twice her own weight. They head off down the road, giggling at the foreigner who can't carry a bucket on his head.
This is how many South Africans get their water every day – many times a day. But at least they have water. That is largely due to the efforts of the South African government.
"We've supplied water to over 7 million people – that's putting infrastructure in the ground and making sure it works. That's quite good progress," says Mike Muller, the director-general of the Department of Water Affairs of South Africa.
His government's achievements in water supply are real and they are significant. There is not so much a problem of water scarcity here, as there is a problem of water delivery. Under apartheid, the minority white population, just 15 per cent of the population, consumed most of the country's water. One-third of all South Africans had no access to clean drinking water.
Muller and his department have cut that number in half. They achieved in just eight years what world leaders only recently pledged to do in other countries over the next 12 years. Muller is proud of the record.
"If the people have been carrying water for a kilometre or two kilometres, they'll tell you it's made a tremendous difference," says Muller. "And certainly, one beats one's own drum, but you can go and look at the independent research and say 'what's changed in your life?' and certainly in rural areas and many places many people say we do actually now have water."
Those achievements don't tell the whole story, however. In South Africa, water has also become a source of anger, protest, impoverishment and death. It started when apartheid ended in 1994.
When Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) came to power, former political prisoners and guerrilla fighters took over cabinet posts and top bureaucratic offices. They wrote a new constitution, one that's unique in recognizing access to drinking water as a right of citizenship. Poor South Africans expected great change.
But David McDonald, the director of development studies at Queen's University, says they didn't get it. He spends a lot of time in South Africa coordinating the Municipal Services Project, a research network supported by universities, think tanks and trade unions.
McDonald says that after taking power, ANC leaders began to change. They didn't apply the socialist remedies to problems that many had expected. Instead they decided to try to correct the injustices of apartheid with free market capitalism.
"There was quite a dramatic change in thinking and it started at the top," says McDonald. "People like Nelson Mandela were saying 'privatization is the fundamental policy of our government. Call me a Thatcherite if you will.' And his successor, Thabo Mbeki, famously said 'I am a Thatcherite.'
"But there's also been a lot of pressure from the World Bank. The World Bank has been extremely active working with municipalities and national government, advising particularly on urban policy, saying we're going to fund you if you do this."
The "this" included the privatization of water delivery. It was a philosophical sea-change. Water would become just like any other commodity, to be sold for profit on the open market. Water managers would have to recover the real costs of providing the service, what they call "full cost recovery."
Mike Muller was the man put in charge of that free-market policy, an ironic role for a former Marxist, but one that Muller has embraced.
"The policy for cost recovery is an absolutely sensible way of running a water system and the way most water systems run in the world," he says. "It costs money to provide it and why should one half pay of the public pay for the other half to have vast quantities of water to use. If people don't pay for it, eventually the municipalities will go bankrupt. And if that is the case, it means if you provide free full services to some you are actually taking away basic services from others.
"You know there's a slogan which we use which I'm pleased to see it up on billboards around town at the moment. It says "some for all, not all for some."
The new policy of cost recovery was applied everywhere in South Africa, though in different ways. Some cities simply turned their water utilities over to gigantic French and British water corporations. Elsewhere, utilities that remained public were forced to reduce subsidies and operate like a private business. There are differences in the two models, but poor South Africans just call the whole process privatization – Water for Profit – because that's what they experience in their daily lives.
In an area called Ngwelezane, lives a community of 20,000 to 30,000 working class people, some scratching a living from small gardens, sugar plantations and the like.
David Hemson drives me around Ngwelezane's cratered mud roads to explain how the water policy worked out there. Eighty per cent of residents have to get water from standpipes. Until 1997, the municipality paid. Then cost recovery kicked in. The first step was to charge people for water they used to get for free. One of the stated goals was to stop people from wasting water.
Hemson says that was a wrong-headed idea from the start.
"You can see basically it's a very poor community. People are suffering from a very high level of AIDS and other diseases; and people who are poor are actually very careful about water," he says. "In many of the communities I've been to people say we are limiting everybody to two buckets of water a day and that's it. That's voluntary. They have too low expectations of the amount of the water they should have because that's well below international standards."
When water bills started showing up, people ignored them. Many simply couldn't afford to pay the amounts charged. So the local water utility decided to make people pay before they got their water.
David Hemson stops in front of an odd looking device beside the road. It's a rectangular cement box with a water pipe running into it and various wires and gears inside. It's a pre-paid water meter.
"This is a Bumpenaze water meter, which works by putting in a card in the system and then you get so many litres," explains Hemson. "When you pull the card out, it stops. They put these in instead of taps which people could open and close themselves. It was quite capricious. Quite often it would break down and you'd not get water and you would lose your money at the same time."
"The pre-paid meter is without a doubt the most insidious device," says David McDonald of the Municipal Services Project. "What it does is create a self-imposed cut off. Somebody will go out and say, 'Well I can only afford 40 Rands worth of water this month and therefore that is all that I am going to buy.' And that may have absolutely no relationship to what they actually need to lead healthy and productive lives. The municipality loves it and private sector providers love it because it avoids the kindsof hassles and costs associated with trying to collect the money and it also deflects the bad publicity away from them of having to go in and cut them off."
Two years ago last August, most of the pre-paid water meters in Ngwelezane had broken down. Meanwhile the local water utility took a more aggressive approach to households with their own water pipes which had fallen behind in their payments. They were cut off. Locks were put on their meters. "No money – no water," the water managers told the people of Ngwelezane.
That is how a tragedy started.
"Down below we see the Lake Emshulatuzi, which is highly polluted," says Hemson. "The people who found there had been locks put on their taps were forced to go back to the original sources, either the lake or the river."
But of course the nearby lakes and rivers were cauldrons of bacteria, one of them the bacteria that causes cholera. It infects the intestine, causing diarrhea, vomiting, leg cramps, and the rapid loss of body fluids leads to dehydration and shock. Death can occur within hours.
This would be the worst cholera outbreak in South Africa's recent history.
"We're looking at about just below 300 people dying from cholera, about 350,000 people were affected," says Hemson. "There were emergency hospitals set up, tents were set up for re-hydration purposes. It was devastating. The cost has been tremendous – and just imagine if all that money had been spent on providing services in the first place. This has been a real disaster zone."
And that, at the cost of almost 300 lives, is how the people of Ngwelezane came to get a new standpipe and a low, flat rate for their water.
For the government of South Africa, the cholera epidemic is a sore point, an outbreak of a disease associated with the old days of colonialism, not the new democratic South Africa. Water Affairs Director Mike Muller refuses to accept that his government's policies may have been to blame.
- Mike Muller: "Our impression is that people drew conclusions about the cholera outbreak which weren't really justified. Cholera sweeps down the east coast of Africa every 10 to 20 years. The linkage that was made is not really backed up by fact."
CBC's Bob Carty: "So, no responsibility in government policy for the cholera situation?"
Mike Muller: "I come to the statement: the pandemic of Cholera comes down the east African coast every 10-20 years and this was one more. South Africa at the moment cannot provide, free full services to everybody."
Researchers like David Hemson disagree.
Yes, there have been previous cholera outbreaks, but this one claimed ten times more victims than the last major outbreak. Hemson also rejects the claim that South Africa couldn't afford to give people free water. The national government, he notes, is spending millions on tax cuts for the wealthy and on defence. And at the time of the tragedy, the local water utility had millions of dollars in the bank even as it cut water off in Ngwelezane.
Hemson lays the blame for the cholera outbreak and the deaths squarely on the government's free-market policy.
"That was the direct cause of the cholera epidemic. There is no doubt about that," he says. "This is a neo-liberal policy, which in a sense is quite surprising because you'd imagine in a majority-rule government you would want to see the poorest of the poor, which of course is the black majority, would be getting the benefits of the new system. But it's not happening as yet."
Another impact of water privatization can be found at the other end of South Africa, in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town.
"The one truck is the security for the Uni-city, the other is the boys which they use to cut off the water," says Cecilia Davis, a resident of this township, as we drive behind two white vans from the Uni-city government. The trucks are the water enforcers. "These are the people that come in and cut the water off of people. They're going to lose their water and they don't know what to do. What they are going to do without the water?"
Ahead, the two vans stop in front of a small house. Two armed security guards get out of one truck. Out of the other jump six men with wrenches and hammers. The workers lift up a water covering on the street, and start hammering and twisting the values of the meter going into the home. A burly, armed security officer stands guard.
- CBC's Bob Carty: "What are you doing here?"
Security Guard: "Cutting off the water supply."
CBC's Bob Carty: "For what reason?"
Security Guard: "I don't know. You must speak to the people in the civic centre. I'm not the spokesperson for the city council."
CBC's Bob Carty: "How many of these do you do a day?"
Security Guard: "I told you, I'm not the spokesperson for the city council. You must speak to the people in the civic centre of water works."
The security guard writes down my license plate number and radios it in to his office.
In 15 minutes the job is done. The residents of the household are now like thousands of others in the township who are fortunate enough to have water pipes coming into their homes, but no running water. Professor David McDonald says this has become all too common a ritual across South Africa.
"Our estimate, based on a large national survey that we did in 2001, is that as many as 10 million people have had their water cut off since 1994," he says. "Some of that has been very short term, but some of this has been for months and months on end."
In fact, it has almost been 12 months for Cecilia Davis herself.
"I am opening the tap but there is no water coming out. None. Not even a little bit," she says.
Davis is a single mother with four children still at home. Home is a cold, dark, three-room cement shelter, with no water.
- Cecilia Davis: "Nothing whatsoever. It's making a noise instead of letting water come out because the water has been cut off, the meter was removed, almost a year."
CBC's Bob Carty: Almost a year? So how do you get water?"
Cecilia Davis: "I get water from opposite neighbour with the pots."
Davis' life now revolves around fetching water from the neighbours – one pot for breakfast, one to flush the toilet, ten to do the washing, then lunch and bathing the children, and then the toilet again.
Davis has no income, just the support of neighbours and family. That's not uncommon here in the townships where 60 per cent are unemployed. In recent years, the city raised Cecilia's monthly water bill by 300 per cent. She couldn't pay it. And even though she had two sick children in the house, the city cut her water off. It wasn't what she expected from the post-apartheid governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.