South Africa: a success story?

South Africa: a success story? 
 
Improvement of infrastructure and service standards should be undertaken in
part because of the negative environmental externalities associated with
lower standards. It is the environment that pays when pit latrines leak
pollutants into groundwater, when sewage systems fail, when improper
drainage leads to flooding, erosion and the washing of human waste into
surface water, and when coal and wood are used by households instead of
cleaner, healthier electricity. Environmental pollution results in actual
costs to health, property, and quality of life. The environment is a public
good, and the public as a whole must take responsibility for it.

The only way to test the arguments for upgrading both water/sanitation and
electricity access for low-income households, is to make these available in
sufficient quantities on a lifeline basis. Because of several pressure
points that built up during the mid-late 1990s, this suddenly appeared
feasible. But how genuine was Pretoria's commitment to free household
infrastructural services?


Sabotaging free services


Until September 2000, South Africans were becoming increasingly familiar
with the interrelated policies of low infrastructure standards, higher
services prices than could be afforded, mass cutoffs of water and
electricity, evictions and sheriff sales, privatisation and
commercialisation, captive regulation, and so many other manifestations of
infrastructure apartheid. In February 2000, water minister Ronnie Kasrils
hinted that a change of policy was feasible. But it was only in September,
when president Thabo Mbeki addressed a trade union conference, that suddenly
'free basic services' offered hope precisely where neoliberal policy had
failed: in pricing water, sanitation, electricity, solid waste and other
municipal functions.

What caused the reversal of ANC policy? Several factors converged:


. growing alienation and apathy in townships, along with declining activity
in ANC branches, leading to fears that substantial voter abstention would
lower the ruling party's overall vote and cost it control in key
municipalities;

. the massive outbreak of cholera, which attracted international attention
and undermined popular faith in the water system (even in the cities, where
fears of contagion soon emerged);

. Mbeki's bizarre public allegation, at the time of the July 2000
International Aids Conference in Durban, that 'HIV doesn't cause Aids,
poverty causes Aids', which required a rapid, face-saving backtrack, i.e.,
addressing poverty by giving away a few drops of free water;

. the imminent September 2000 Grootboom decision in the Constitutional
Court, which signalled that the Court was finally going to get serious about
enforcing the Bill of Rights provisions on socio-economic rights in the
Constitution; and finally,

. a dawning realisation that the neoliberal water pricing policy was causing
more costs than benefits for the society as a whole, and certainly for Dwaf'
s reputation.


To illustrate the latter point, in early 2001, Dwaf director-general Mike
Muller conceded to presenter Vuyo Mbuli, 'Perhaps we were being a little too
market-oriented' [in supplying water/sanitation services].

An even more refreshing (potential) break with the past appeared in the ANC
promise in the run-up to the December 2000 municipal elections: 'The ANC-led
local government will provide all residents with a free basic amount of
water, electricity and other municipal services so as to help the poor.
Those who use more than the basic amounts, will pay for the extra they use'.
Note the use of phrases like 'all residents' and 'free', and the explicit
endorsement of what is known as a 'rising block tariff' so that those who
consume more pay a higher cost per unit, in order that they cross-subsidise
the poor.

Would the poor, and indeed all residents of South Africa, at least be
guaranteed a 'basic' amount of water and other services? The principle is
excellent, and indeed reflects the mandate from the RDP to implement a free
lifeline plus redistributive approach to pricing services, instead of the
marginal-cost based strategy that had become the conventional wisdom in
Dwaf, Eskom and many municipalities.


Subversive discourses and practices

Hostile bureaucrats, whether in the state or even quasi-NGOs, have many
tools at their disposal to subvert political processes. Many arguments were
brought into play for this purpose, requiring a brief consideration of the
neoliberal discourses and progressive rebuttals. These apply to water in
particular, because free lifeline electricity and other services were
delayed for many months, but the principles are more general.

One allegation was that people suffering a 'culture of non-payment' spent
their money on the Lotto, casinos, or cellphones. An old-guard official of
the Mhlathuze Water Board, who cut off low-income people's supply at the
scene of the cholera epidemic epicentre, told the Sunday Times in October
2000, 'People will gladly pay R7 for a two-litre Coke, but complain bitterly
when they must pay the same price for more than 1,000 litres of water'. In
reality, studies that include highly detailed household-income analysis have
shown that in virtually all of the cases of non-payment, affordability has
been the universal problem.

Likewise, another 'blame the victim' gambit was to accuse rural people of
wanting unreasonably high standards of sanitation. This was important to
explain their unwillingness to pay the R150 deposit that Dwaf required so as
to access a larger subsidy that would pay for installation of a pit latrine.
Once this line of argument began, it was hard to stop. There soon emerged in
Pretoria a more general distaste for black rural people's primitive levels
of sanitation. 'They' need much more hygienic education, and by 2002 a
public education campaign was launched with Kasrils attempting to teach
young rural children to wash their hands, 'the way our mothers used to teach
us'.

Mvula Trust and similar NGOs delivering services to poor communities
initially opposed the free water strategy and continued to promote the full
cost-recovery strategy, because they argued that the free water promise
would lead to the destruction of their rural-water projects. Water
committees had been set up to compel people to pay full cost-recovery for
operating/maintenance expenses. But in reality, most such projects were
failing, again because ability to pay in rural areas was very limited, and
receded consequent with the country's worsening unemployment and inequality.

The Trust, set up by Piers Cross--who came from the World Bank, and then
returned to a Bank job coordinating African water policy--imposed the
generic full-cost recovery strategy, based upon community payment of 100%
operating/maintenance costs with no recurrent subsidies. Taps were typically
several hundred metres from residents instead of within yards/houses, and by
Mvula's own admission contributed to the spread of infectious disease. The
boreholes, pumps and pipes are typically too thin or low-capacity to carry
more than a maximum of 25 litres per person per day. Because of Mvula's
niggardly design, people attempting to get more water closer to their houses
often broke hose connections into the pipes, thus leaving merely a trickle
behind at the tap. Water-borne sanitation was typically not on the agenda of
Mvula projects, and most tap installations didn't even include pit latrine
sanitation. A huge proportion of Mvula's rural schemes failed as a result.

Diverting attention from the failures already underway, an Mvula staffperson
wrote in a widely circulated electronic newsletter in mid-2002 that 'The
free basic water policy, however praiseworthy in its intentions, may be seen
as a genuine threat to the success and sustainability of community-managed
projects'. As for the prize-winning Nhlungwane project in Southern KwaZulu
Natal, which claimed a R11,000 bank balance, 'Neither the Village Water
Committee nor the community had any knowledge of the free basic water policy
launched in November 2001'.

Keeping partner communities ignorant of the possibilities for advocacy and
redistribution was the sort of strategy that sociologists James Petras and
Henry Veltmeyer pointed out in a study called 'NGOs in the service of
imperialism':


That is where the NGO's play an important function. They deflect popular
discontent away from the powerful institutions towards local micro-projects,
apolitical 'grassroots' self-exploitation and 'popular education' that
avoids class analysis of imperialism and capitalism. On the one hand they
criticise dictatorships and human rights violations but on the other they
compete with radical socio-political movements in an attempt to channel
popular movements into collaborative relations with dominant neoliberal
elites. Contrary to the public image of themselves as innovative grassroots
leaders, they are in reality grassroots reactionaries who complement the
work of the IMF and other institutions by pushing privatisation from below
and demobilising popular movements, thus undermining resistance.


Another sabotage strategy emerged in the form of the 'means test', by which
municipalities aimed to work out who the genuinely poor are by estimating
their monthly income. The extreme complexity of this strategy was
illustrated by the situation in Johannesburg where 'indigent grants' reached
fewer than 40,000 households, although in reality there were hundreds of
thousands who should be qualifying. Johannesburg's experience was not
atypical, because as demonstrated in virtually all international cases,
means tests are mainly a stigmatising device, serving as a barrier to
prevent state resources from getting to people who need them.

Notably, the failure of the late 1990s means tests in Johannesburg did not
prevent another round in 2002 for pensioners, disabled people, Aids
patients/orphans and households with below R1500 per month income. Leading
metro politician Kenny Fihla bragged that 'Every resident living in
Johannesburg will have basic services free of charge if they cannot afford
them' beginning on July 1. Yet at the same time, the Council continued with
its draconian services cutoffs often based on incompetent billing: 92,400
water and electricity cuts were made from January-April 2002.

Conversely, a crucial pro-business form of sabotage came from bureaucrats,
especially in the DTI, backed by minister Alec Erwin, who opposed any form
of cross-subsidisation in which business paid higher prices for services.
Even Dwaf's 2001 'Free Basic Services' policy document also explicitly
vetoed such cross-subsidies, notwithstanding the fact that the National
Water Act had recently permitted the state to charge large bulk users and
raw-water extraction by farmers, often for the first time. Other users had
been charged through Dwaf's 'Trading Account' for many years, and such
accounts could have been augmented by the few hundred million rand required
to assure municipalities served all existing serviced residents, and
acquired capital investment funds for those without water services.

But the argument in Cabinet in October 2000 by DTI, Dwaf and the Department
of Finance was that higher services bills for corporations represented a
hidden tax which would impair economic growth. The cliche often evoked was
that by raising water tariff rates on large corporations, you 'kill the
goose that lays the golden egg'. Business South Africa had successfully won
this case amongst the 'social partners' at the Nedlac Development Chamber in
1996-97, and by the time of the alleged free water policy, had trained state
bureaucrats to serve their interests effectively.

Still another important technique to sabotage free services was the use of
the word 'flexibility', by which a national minister was discouraged from
applying pressure to a local municipality. The excuse was that each
municipality had unique local circumstances, so that no overarching tariff
policy with a minimum lifeline plus rising block tariff would be
appropriate. Even more than flexibility, the favoured jargon of
sabotage-minded bureaucrats includes abuse of the word 'sustainability' to
describe entirely self-financing water schemes, thereby implicitly rejecting
any kind of subsidy to low-income people. (Refer to the alleged merits of
cost-recovery, above.)

A classic bureaucratic trick to foil the provision of free services for
people was to limit it to those who had cleared their arrears with the local
municipality. Of course, officials rarely considered why people were already
in arrears, namely the massive unemployment in townships and the relatively
higher prices township and rural residents pay for electricity, compared
with high-income consumers and large corporations. In Johannesburg, arrears
of R1.2 billion in 1995 had soared to R4.5 billion by 2002. Instead of
blaming the culture of entitlement, as has been common, a surprisingly frank
consultant to the city admitted that 'Due to the country's economic
position, thousands of ratepayers lost their jobs and are now unable to pay
their accounts. The council was also unable to enforce credit control
because it lacked efficient staff and an effective strategy'.

Likewise, another trick deployed in Durban by the metro water director was
to provide 6000 litres free to low-income households, but charges were
levied for the full amount once consumption exceeded the free amount. In
other words, the first litre after 6000 were consumed would cost the same as
6001 litres. The same metro government, often praised for being the country'
s most advanced in supplying water serices to the poor, also cut off water
supplies to township schools in 2001.

Ironically, one concept deployed to sabotage free services delivery was
'equity'. Because the government had not invested enough capital in
infrastructure by 2000, the argument was advanced that to give a free
lifeline supply of water or electricity would only reward those who already
had the service. Given the vast number of broken taps and electricity supply
cuts, the argument was compelling at first blush. But on second glance, it
is easy to see how equity was deployed as a deterrent to immediately supply
free services.

The related complaint many municipal officials made was of severe fiscal
constraints. It was true that the Department of Finance's 'equitable share'
remained vastly insufficient. But by way of rebuttal, in addition to
restoring the central-municipal grants that had eroded by 85% in real terms
during the 1990s, national-scale cross-subsidies in electricity and water
should have been expanded to help smaller, impoverished municipalities pay
for the recurrent costs of free services. National-local electricity
cross-subsidies already existed, and were reportedly in excess of a R1
billion transfer from corporations to consumers. Likewise, Dwaf had the
ability in its 1998 legislation to price water from its national office so
as to cross-subsidise to poor consumers via their municipalities.

Within six weeks of the December 2000 election, sabotage of the free
services promise, which the white/coloured-dominated DA also advanced to win
several important municipal elections in the Western Cape, had become
widespread. Samwu released a statement explaining the situation in the
Western Cape town of Hermanus.


Despite the promises of free services bandied around during the local
government elections campaigns, the Democratic Alliance Council will evict
the second batch of families since the elections this Saturday. Hermanus has
also been lauded as having a progressive block tariff for water which
supposedly allows the indigent to pay an affordable amount. This has been
exposed as a lie now that families are being evicted for not being able to
pay their entire water bills. The DA has been proceeding quietly with
evictions, hoping that media attention would not be drawn to their deceitful
actions ... The union believes that these evictions are happening merely as
an act of intimidation. There is no way that the families who already cannot
pay for a basic human right will be able to fork out the thousands now
demanded of them from private lawyers who have added on massive interest
amounts. According to information received by the union, the decision to
evict the families was taken by the Treasury Department of Council and a few
DA Councillors--not a full sitting of newly elected councillors.


Flaws in the promise

A certain amount of sabotage was built into the very nature of the ANC's
promise, since even if the effort was genuine, the redistributive principle
was not backed up by thoughtful, detailed provisions. To illustrate, first,
the ANC's use of the word 'household'--as in a Western-style nuclear
family--meant that the free services were automatically biased against large
families, in favour of single-person or 'double-income, no-kids' (dinky)
households. Second, the absolute amount of services to be supplied was
inadequate for large families, particularly those in which People With Aids
required more water and electricity for ensuring hygienic treatment of
opportunistic diseases.

In the case of water, the promise of 6000 litres per family each month was
not more than a couple of toilet flushes per day for each member of a large
family of eight people. Families in which Aids struck down a middle layer of
adults often had as many double that number of dependents on a single
property. In contrast, the RDP called for a medium-term lifeline supply of
at least 50-60 litres for each person in a household per day, available
on-site, not at a communal tap. The late-1990s campaign for free water by
Samwu and the Rural Development Services Network endorsed the 50 litres
minimum goal.

It was inexplicable that after so many years in government, Kasrils and his
staff still worked on an RDP 'short-term' target closer to 25 litres per
capita per day for large families. Moreover, in late 1998, Dwaf bureaucrats
had attempted to revise the target figure for low-density areas downwards to
7 litres.

In contrast, it would have been a relatively simple and cost-effective
annual exercise for municipal officials to add a single additional record to
each billing address. That record would allow the number of people with
identification to be noted, with provisions to prevent the possibility of
double-claiming the free water entitlement. Similar systems could have been
established in the electricity sector. But some cities like Cape Town went
ahead with an extremely inadequate 20 kiloWatt hours per household per
month, amplifying all the same problems but with such a miserly lifeline
amount that after a few days, the monthly free lifeline would be used up.

If courageous politicians and officials wanted to overrule the
sabotage-minded colleague, what could they have done, in the wake of the
cholera outbreak and growing national attention to the life-threatening
state of rural water supply? A partial list applied to Dwaf would have
included:


. take the bull by the horns and admit culpability for the cholera fiasco;

. start integrating benefit analysis alongside costs (comparing benefits of
cholera/diarrhoea/etc.-abatement with costs of a modicum of free basic
water);

. begin telling society that large water users will have to pay more, so as
to start introducing water-saving technologies; and

. establish a forceful case that the users of nearly 90% of South Africa's
(non-household) water--commercial farmers, forestry companies, mines,
industries, commercial enterprises, and electricity generators--will pay a
bit more so that the millions who have none will get a basic amount free.


The opposite strategy seems to have been chosen by Dwaf officials:


. slide around the problem, repudiate liability for cholera and other
water-related diseases;

. claim that if people haven't got sanitation systems, it's their fault;

. provide a bit of Jik bleach, shovels and community-development ideology
instead of proper systems;

. deny that millions of people suffer from water schemes that have broken;

. cut still further Dwaf's operating and maintenance funds for those schemes
(by more than R100 million from 2001 to 2002 even before inflation,
notwithstanding increases in new capital spending of R400 million, which
would in turn require additional operating subsidies);

. protect big business, including commercial farmers and Eskom, from paying
a fair share for water; and

. continue to maintain many of the neoliberal premises within
slightly-rewritten policy documents.


Policy reversions

While the concrete struggles over municipal infrastructure were unfolding,
policy redrafting was also in motion. Because the revised Miif and a
forthcoming water white paper were in rough draft form at press time, full
critiques will await another opportunity. Nevertheless, it may be useful to
remind ourselves that the next stage of sabotaging free services would be in
the sphere of policy discourses.

Throughout the period under review, the policy debates typically boiled down
to two competing perspectives. We will also observe these differences
emerging in other of the water and energy terrains in the next chapter. In a
variety of areas of policy, legislation and implementation, the mainstream
approach is ameliorative, and works with, rather than against, market
imperatives. The critical approach relies upon a rights-based philosophy,
and considers ways to sustain the alliances of poor and working people
required to implement progressive policies.

All of these sabotage gimmicks are comprehensible if one takes the
experience of free basic services in South Africa back to the global scale,
to venues like the World Water Forum, the African Utilities Partnership or
the World Bank itself, as we do in the next chapter. There, such an
anti-neoliberal, pro-entitlement position simply cannot hold, in a context
of thorough commodification of water.

Finally, however, as a linkage between the two chapters, consider the World
Bank's Sourcebook on Community Driven Development in the Africa Region,
produced and circulated in March 2000, a month after Kasrils first hinted at
the free lifeline policy. Reacting to Kasrils--because there was no other
major free water drive in Africa at the time--the Bank staff authoring the
Sourcebook put their position very explicitly: 'Work is still needed with
political leaders in some national governments to move away from the concept
of free water for all'.