Johannesburg — As national leaders, corporations, and non-governmental organizations gathered in Japan for the Kyoto World Water Forum, a South African row about secrecy was focusing attention on whether one of the most widely touted policies for improving services - the public-private partnership - was really serving the people's interests.
Water management in cities like Johannesburg is part of a worldwide $200 billion corporate industry. Whereas in the past, water provision was wholly handled in the public sector, private corporations are now encouraged to join public-private partnerships to help cash-strapped municipal authorities meet the public demand for water.
But corporate participation brings corporate business practices. Water companies often insist that their contracts with municipal governments are kept confidential. And that's where things got sticky in Johannesburg.
Johannesburg's water was corporatized in 2000 when Jowam, a subsidiary of the France-based Suez conglomerate, won a bid to manage the utility along with Johannesburg Water, a publicly-owned entity.
Under the agreement, Jowam provides water services while Johannesburg Water manages billing and community tariff collections. But those who have asked for details on the terms of the deal, have been rebuffed and the argument has become both personal and high-profile.
Ebrahim Harvey, a 48-year-old graduate student is writing a thesis on the privatization of Johannesburg's water services and in recent months has gone head to head with Johannesburg Water (JW) in his battle for information.
"It's not a matter of what JW has given me, it's a matter of what they leave out," says Harvey. "These omissions have gravely detracted from my research."
City officials not only disagree with Harveys version of events, a serious level of discord has developed between them. Harvey alleges that last month Johannesburg Water's CEO, Anthony Still, nearly assaulted him at a public convention.
Still has written a letter to Harvey's dean at Witwatersrand University complaining that "I find it extremely disconcerting that an institution such as Wits allows its students to interact with business organizations for the purpose of research in such an unfettered manner."
But water is a critical issue for many people in South Africa. The ANC government has reduced the number of people without access to clean drinking water by 50 percent since 1994 -- bringing water to some 7 million people. But there are still 6 million without access to clean water, and many more who cannot afford to pay for it.
A vocal lobby in South Africa argues that allowing private companies to become involved in providing water discriminates against the poor; in the view of some, Harvey is being denied information because he is so partisan.
Last week, the locally-based Freedom of Expression Institution (FXI), filed a formal request with the publicly-owned Johannesburg Water under South Africa's Access to Information Act, to force release of the same documents that Harvey has been denied. If JW refuses the request, then FXI threatens to take the matter to the Constitutional Court.
"JW has one foot on the public plank and the other on the private one," says FXI director Jane Duncan. "In the case of water, the lack of access to information could be life-threatening."
Johannesburg city officials emphatically reject this characterization. "It's not an issue of access to information, it's an issue of [Harvey's] serious ideological problems," said city councilor Brian Hlongwa shortly before departing for Kyoto.
The track record of privatized water services around the world has been patchy. Only about five percent of the world's water is currently in private hands, but in places like Bolivia and Argentina, public resistance to it has resulted in violence, sometimes death.
A common complaint is affordability. When water is privatized, charges rise making it hard for the poorest members of society to get access. In some cases, they have been forced to use alternative water sources like rivers and streams, with attendant health risks.
Two years ago, in South Africa's KwaZulu Natal Province, there were over 100,000 cases of cholera due to such a situation.
Suez officials say they do not set the high charges, the local governments are responsible. But municipal councils must set water rates at a level that allows them to meet the cost of private contractors. That is why Ebrahim Harvey argues that if communities are to assess the role of private companies in water provision, they need to see the terms of the agreement in any public-private partnership.
Prepaid water meters
The latest development in Johannesburg's water services is the installation of prepaid water meters in Soweto, the city's biggest and most impoverished district, by 2004.
The system works by granting an initial "lifeline" of 6,000 liters of water per month free to families before they start paying for their service. The figure is calculated on the assumption that a family of eight can get by on 25 liters per person/per day (the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 50 liters per person/per day).
In order to get more than the basic lifeline, one has to buy credit on the water meter in advance. According to city councilor Brian Hlongwa, this will help curtail the vast problem of water waste and theft that's become notorious at Soweto's water taps.
Though the prepaid system was attempted in the UK in the late 1990s and subsequently abandoned because of public dissent, Hlongwa has confidence that the plan will receive praise.
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But according to Patrick Bond, Ebrahim Harvey's professor at Wits University's Department of Public and Development Management and a well-known radical critic of the ANC government, privatization still undermines the affordability of service.
Bond attributes this to the pricing strategy of the private contractor - in this case Suez - which is dictated by economies of scale: the more water you consume, the more money you save in the long run.
"It's a structure that the World Bank encourages as well because it creates an incentive for private investment."
Meanwhile, a group of about 100 community members in Orange Farm, a poor township 30 minutes south of Johannesburg, convened behind an auto garage to discuss how privatization issues affect their daily lives. Orange Farm is the place where Johannesburg Water has been piloting the prepaid meter system proposed for Soweto.
Several people at the meeting broached the idea of destroying the prepaid meters in their neighborhood, arguing that it should be done on principle. After further discussion the idea was overruled as "too rash an action for a place like Orange Farm."
"It wouldn't make a very noticeable statement anyway," says Philemon Tjeba, an Orange Farm resident. "But I can't imagine what's going to happen when they try prepaid meters in Soweto."
