By Leonissah Munjoma – SANF 04 no 24
Just where does the privatisation buck stop? This question relates to how privatisation of economies and commodities is negatively affecting poor people in many countries of southern Africa.
Privatisation has not just ended at the sale of state owned companies — it has gone further to claim a commodity every human being needs to survive, in fact a basic human right, water.
As the world celebrates World Water Day, privatisation of the commodity is shrouded in controversy in many African countries where related policies such as prepayment and limits on the amount of water one may use exist.
These policies are largely a result of economic policies backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who argue that the solution to water problems is privatisation.
Privatisation of water, according to its proponents, increases efficiency, conserves the environment and reduces poverty. But it has negatively affected the poor both in urban and rural areas as they resort to avoiding water bills by compromising their safety through accessing water from sources such as unprotected wells.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) focus on reducing poverty by improving the efficiency and sustainability of water supply and sanitation services. To meet this challenge, the World Bank is advocating the commercialisation of water arguing that to achieve the MDGs, investment in water supply and sanitation should double from US$15 billion a year.
What this means is that there should be more private sector involvement in the water business and water should be paid for at rates that are competitive enough to afford the private sector profit. It is this private sector involvement in water management that has led to the use of prepayment meters in some southern African countries.
Residents from both urban and rural areas in Namibia, Swaziland, South Africa and Tanzania have to buy prepaid cards for water before consumption. Consumers draw water by inserting the prepaid card into the meter. The balance is adjusted as one draws the water. Service is automatically terminated if the payment balance is depleted until the consumer can pay again.
As the Public Citizen newsletter notes, this practice has brought increased suffering and higher incidences of water-borne diseases such as cholera. Research has confirmed that the increased incidence of cholera was a result of the use of various cost recovery techniques including the installation of prepayment meters to replace free communal standpipes.
Additionally, inadequate water and sanitation service provision exacerbates the condition of people suffering from immune deficiencies such as HIV and AIDS.
The water problem has ruptured social cohesion in neighbourhoods and communities. In rural areas, it was common to share water when a neighbour’s tap was faulty, but that was when the water was free.
When one has to pay for the water, it is difficult to share with neighbours as this means the meter would be ticking away. Thus the basic commodity has become a privilege to access and yet the MDGs aim to halve the number of people without access to clean water by 2015.
“A large number of women, in the Ngwelezane/Empangeni municipalities, spoke of feeling humiliated because of problems in accessing water after the introduction of the prepayment meters.
Many respondents described how they had to beg for water from neighbours because they had no money. The end result is simply the deprivation of a basic human right to those most in need,” says Public Citizen, with reference to South Africa.
Over one billion people still lack access to safe water, and nearly two billion lack safe sanitation and the majority are in developing countries. The lack of access to clean and affordable water contributes to the spread of water-borne diseases, which kill more than three million people, mostly children, each year.
The claim that privatisation helps to foster approaches that are “people-centred, market-based and earth-friendly is falsified when one considers the negative effects on the very people who are supposed to benefit.
There is therefore need to explore other ways of making clean water accessible to the majority poor in southern Africa other than privatisation. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on Shared Water Courses has come up with ways in which water resources could be managed and shared.
Critics of the privatisation policy say much as public-private partnerships are essential, they are not appropriate for the developing countries.
“Water is too essential to be a commodity. Public-private partnerships are appropriate but it is absolutely irresponsible to privatise in developing countries,” says Ronnie Kasrils, Minister for Water Resources in South Africa in an article in the African Agenda magazine.
What is needed in the developing countries, particularly in southern Africa is adequate donor funding for various country programmes on water with “no conditions attached”.
“Donors should provide additional financial support to government priorities, move away from unnecessary conditionalities and rethink grant financing of peri-urban and rural investments in specific country initiatives,” Salim Ahmed Salim, African Development Bank (ADB) Coordinator for Water, says in the African Agenda article.
Water privatization may be a solution to water management that leads to access to clean water by the majority of world’s citizens but it certainly is not the solution in southern Africa as this further marginalises the poor.
