Kyoto World Water Forum

What has Jo'burg Water got to hide? 
 
Secret Contracts Row Puts Spotlight on Water Management


allAfrica.com

March 22, 2003
Posted to the web March 22, 2003

Zack Wales
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 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.

"If a poor person exceeds the 6,000-liter lifeline by one liter, they
effectively pay for 6,001 liters of water," says Bond, drawing on statistics
provided by the World Bank. "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."

***

(Note by Patrick Bond -- Apparently at the Human Rights Day protest in
Orange Farm yesterday, which attracted around 2,000 demonstrators who
marched to Council offices, the police confiscated some pre-paid water and
electricity meters that the community group and their Anti-Privatisation
Forum allies from all over Johannesburg were intent on destroying for
symbolic purposes. I haven't seen any media coverage of this yet. On another
point, a tiny correction is needed here: a comment I made about one of the
bureaucrats' and privatisers' many techniques for sabotaging the ANC's 'free
basic water' promise -- "If a poor person exceeds the 6,000-liter lifeline
by one liter, they effectively pay for 6,001 liters of water" -- doesn't
apply to Suez in Johannesburg, where block-tariff pricing of a just
*slightly* redistributive sort has been adopted by the Johannesburg Council,
though the problem may apply more widely across SA municipalities. I can
provide the information about the block pricing adopted here in Jo'burg, and
why it is apallingly inadequate for other reasons -- mainly, the convex
shape of the tariff curve which does rise very steeply after the first,
inadequate block -- if anyone wants, by emailing me at pbond@sn.apc.org.
However, it is important to note that the administrative savings anticipated
from only starting to charge households after the 6,000th liter consumed
each month -- and then for the full 6,001+, as was the case in Durban, the
pilot for this scheme -- was minister Ronnie Kasrils' unthought-through
justification in February 2000 for providing the first 6,000 free in the
first place. I.e., instead of being considered a human right, water was
merely an administrative service for which the costs of billing the poor
outweighed the revenues up to 6,000 liters each month. Maybe the stingy
policy can be reformed, if protests grow more intense over the subsequent
disconnections -- which Kasrils admits are unconstitutional, though he
permits them to continue -- when people can't afford to pay... But certainly
all our technical inputs, including recent testimony to parliament about the
incompetent design of the free water programme -- which by the way was
carried out by a neoliberal consultancy, Palmer Development Group, notorious
for opposing free water from 1994-2000 -- have failed to make any dent, as
usual. Regrettably, this government doesn't listen to reason, only to
grassroots protest.)

***

(The largest French newspaper, L'Humanite, ran this piece on Tuesday.)

Le robinet se ferme pour les communautés démunies

Afrique du Sud. Suez gère un service public mais refuse de dévoiler ses
informations internes.


Johannesburg (Afrique du Sud),

Correspondance particulière.

Avec plus de sept millions de personnes raccordées à l'eau depuis 1994 et
6000 litres d'eau par foyer fournis chaque mois gratuitement, l'Afrique du
Sud fait souvent figure de modèle pour sa politique de l'eau. Pourtant, l'or
bleu reste hors de portée des plus pauvres. Une situation que la
privatisation galopante du secteur risque de rendre plus problématique
encore. C'est le cas à Johannesburg où, en 2001, la municipalité crée
Johannesburg Water, une entreprise privée dont elle est l'actionnaire
unique, et qui, espère-t-elle, va lui permettre de renflouer ses caisses. "
La ville veut que nous fassions du profit ", explique sans barguigner
Anthony Still, directeur exécutif de la société. Au moment de sa création,
Johannesburg Water lance aussi un partenariat avec Jowam, un consortium dont
Suez, géant mondial du secteur, est le principal détenteur, afin de gérer
les services d'eau et d'assainissement de la capitale économique
sud-africaine.

" Depuis 1996, les transferts de financements nationaux vers les
municipalités ont été réduits de plus de 60% ", s'insurge Dale McKinley du
Mouvement anti-privatisation (APF). " Du coup, les villes doivent s'
auto-financer et leur seule source de revenus réside dans la privatisation
". Dans le même temps, elles font siennes le principe de " recouvrement des
coûts ", très prisé par les experts des institution financières
internationales. Autrement dit, les villes tentent d'éponger leurs dépenses
en faisant payer les usagers.

Alors à Johannesburg, environ 1000 foyers subissent chaque mois des coupures
d'eau faute de paiement en règle. Au niveau national, il y aurait eu 10 à 13
millions de coupures d'eau depuis 1994 (un chiffre supérieur au nombre de
raccordements). Trop impopulaires, ces méthodes sont en train d'être
remplacées par un autre système : l'installation de compteurs prépayés dans
les quartiers défavorisés pour " instaurer un usage responsable de l'eau, en
espérant qu'ils vont accepter de payer ", assure-t-on à Johannesburg Water.
Avant de généraliser ces compteurs, Suez en a installé un millier dans le
bidonville d'Orange Farm, au sud de la ville, dans le cadre d'un
projet-pilote. Avec les compteurs prépayés (rendus illégaux en
Grande-Bretagne notamment), Johannesburg Water " contrôle la consommation et
ne peut être accusé de couper l'eau ", comme le souligne Dale McKinley de l'
APF.

En fait, les habitants n'ont plus d'autre choix que de consommer la quantité
d'eau que leur budget leur permet, ce qui les oblige souvent à sacrifier d'
autres dépenses telles que l'alimentation ou la scolarisation des enfants,
voire à s'approvisionner dans les cours d'eau, d'où l'éruption d'épidémies
de choléra. " Ce sont les plus pauvres des pauvres qui habitent ici et la
majorité est au chômage ", s'indigne Briggs Mokolo, à la tête du Comité de
crise de l'eau d'Orange Farm.

Il y mène une campagne de mise hors d'usage des compteurs prépayés et se
rend au sommet des ONG du Forum mondial de l'eau pour partager son
expérience, car faire payer l'eau avant de la consommer, " c'est en priver
les plus pauvres ", soit la majorité dans ce qui reste l'un des pays les
plus inégalitaires au monde. D'autant que les 6000 litres mensuels gratuits
sont loin de suffire à des foyers qui regroupent souvent une dizaine de
personnes. L'Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS) recommande, au minimum,
une quantité deux fois plus importante. Une mesure qui eût un temps les
faveurs de l'ANC, mais que le parti a vite abandonnée après quelques années
au pouvoir. La politique de l'eau de Johannesburg suscite donc la réticence
des communautés locales qui refusent de régler leurs factures ou se
connectent à l'eau par leurs propres moyens. La ville chiffre à plus de 12
millions d'euros ses pertes annuelles en impayés et connections illégales.

De plus, il reste difficile de connaître les détails de la politique menée
par Suez à Johannesburg. Ebrahim Harvey en a fait l'expérience à ses frais.
Chercheur à l'université du Witwatersrand, il tente depuis des mois d'
obtenir les rapports internes de la filiale locale de Suez concernant Orange
Farm, ainsi que les contrats qui impliquent Johannesburg Water. Mais il se
heurte à ce qu'il qualifie de " culture du secret et [d']opacité ". Selon
lui, Suez et Johannesburg Water violent ainsi la loi sur la Promotion de l'
accès à l'information, d'autant plus qu'" ils gèrent notre eau pour le
compte du service public ". Au nom du droit de savoir, il menace de mener l'
affaire en justice.

Chrystelle Carroy