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South Africa: A Dry Season for Country's Poor As State Wages 'Water War'
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
COLUMN
5 May 2008
Posted to the web 5 May 2008
Patrick Bond
Johannesburg
WITNESSES can only hope that recent displays of state brutality - in Lenasia by gun-toting police against shack dwellers protesting at the denial of water and sanitation, and in Kliptown through infected water (with at least one fatality) courtesy of the Johannesburg municipality - are aberrant.
But notwithstanding last Wednesday's historic high court ruling against Johannesburg Water (JW) and the national ministry, there is evidence of a systemic water war against the city's low-income majority.
A few weeks prior to Judge Moroa Tsoka's decision, the city shocked residents by retracting the universal free basic water promise that the African National Congress (ANC) made in the 2000 municipal election. The promise would be kept only for the small proportion declared "indigent", who would get a rise from 6kl per household each month.
Moreover, city officials said on Thursday they might appeal against the ruling by Tsoka, who agreed with the Soweto plaintiffs that JW's prepaid water meters and inadequate free water supply violated their constitutional rights. Tsoka ordered the prepaid meters replaced with conventional meters, and that 50l be provided free to each resident.
The arrogant official reaction was soon posted on the municipal website: "The city's efforts to upgrade water infrastructure could suffer a setback following the high court ruling."
Tsoka accused city officials of racism by imposing credit control via prepayment "in the historically poor black areas and not the historically rich white areas". Meter installation apparently occurred "in terms of colour or geographical area", and the community consultation process was "a publicity stunt" characterised by a "big brother approach".
The French firm Suez was responsible for JW's management from 2001 to 2006, and has promoted prepaid meters worldwide, even though Britain banned them in 1998 as a public health threat.
Tsoka's ruling could immediately force other municipalities to adjust tariffs and technologies. For example, last Wednesday the website sagoodnews.co.za applauded Cape Town officials for a similar water-limiting device installed in 7500 households, which appears to suffer the same shortfalls as JW's prepaid meters.
Across SA, it has been safe to assume that powerful municipal constituents -- big business and rich ratepayers -- compelled officials to keep water prices relatively low by cutting provision in lowincome neighbourhoods to a bare minimum. To this end, Suez and the Jo'burg council taught municipalities the following strategies:
- Impose water prices that soar after a very small, token, free amount of roughly two toilet flushes a day for eight-member households, so that the next block of consumption becomes unaffordable;
- Disconnect people who are too poor to pay for any water beyond the free 6kl. At their peak, Johannesburg service disconnections reached 20000 a month during 2002, the council revealed just prior to the World Summit on Sustainable Development;
- Offer the token, free basic water on the basis of a household as a unit, rather than the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) recommendation of 50l a person per day. This creates a bias against larger families and those who have backyard shack dwellers or tenants, who also draw upon the per-household supply;
- Install low-quality water and sanitation technology to tens of thousands of poor households, with the objective of reducing consumption. The technology includes prepaid water meters, chemical toilets, "ventilated improved pit latrines", and "shallow sewage" systems featuring smaller pipes and lower gradients, no cistern for flushing, and the unclogging of faeces by hand when pipes periodically clog; and
- Provide differential technology according to class and race. The hardware listed above is imposed only on people in townships and informal settlements, who suffer additional transport and time-wasting costs acquiring meter cards, not in the formerly all-white suburbs, where people such as me make direct bank account debit payments in order to save our time and effort.
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In March, the Jo'burg city council announced three further innovations:
- Recommit to the failed indigency register - which records only a small proportion of the city's poor - thus dropping a huge group of low-income people from free water allocations, including those who lack formal papers, either because of home affairs department sloth or their foreign origin;
- Further stigmatise poor people by means of "means testing", since gaining indigent status entails accepting invasive - and inevitably inaccurate and ad hoc - state surveillance. Wild plans were under way to link up various Jo'burg municipal records so as to monitor poor people's consumption under a microscope; and
- Terminate universal free services for all, even if that directly contradicts the constitution, the RDP and ANC municipal election promise that says "all residents" will receive free services. In the process, divide consumers into stratified classes, a technique which in turn will eventually diminish political support for free basic water.
All these tactics will have to be rethought now, as the Bill of Rights' socioeconomic clauses finally appear to be growing juridical teeth.
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