All Africa, 22 March 2003
PLEASE NOTE: Readers wanting to reproduce and
reference
this article should contact All Africa
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 Harvey’s 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.
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."