A drinking water crisis divides Ghana

Boston Globe and CBC do H20 critiques, from Accra to Durban 
 
(Maybe the Boston Globe's foreign editor let the little SA cholera
inaccuracy in on purpose, to see if anyone in Jo'burg is watching 
closely...and comrade Muller's smug mug in the CBC website photo needs 
the smile wiped off...........Patrick Bond)

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/040/nation/A_drinking_water_crisis_d
ivides _Ghana+.shtml

A drinking water crisis divides Ghana

Privatization seen shutting out poor

By Lane Hartill, Globe Correspondent, 2/9/2003

[A] CCRA, Ghana - Standing in his tiny general store, Reuben Keh
vented frustration about the price of water - a necessity that most
people here can barely afford.

Keh makes the equivalent of about $2.50 a day and is struggling to
provide for his wife and three children. His biggest expense is
water,
on which he spends a quarter of his income.

''Life is difficult,'' he said, as he watched women prepare kenke, a
local fare of fermented corn paste. ''We are suffering here.''

Keh is one of millions of Ghanaians struggling to afford clean water,
and a plan by the government to privatize water distribution has many
worried that the crisis will worsen.

The fear is that private companies will drive up already high prices
to make a profit - a disaster for the 78 percent of the urban poor
who do not have regular access to piped water.

The concern cuts across much of West Africa. At the heart of the
issue: Who should be in charge of distributing, and how much should
it cost?

Privatizing water is the popular choice in this region, analysts say,
largely because of pressure from the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank. Proponents say it is the only way to fix the
inefficient public systems.

The trend in West Africa, indeed, is toward privatization. Until
1997, only a few privatized water services existed in Africa, mainly
in French-speaking countries, which had granted water contracts to
French companies. But in 1999 and 2000, the number of proposed
privatizations rose dramatically, often because the World Bank and
IMF released loans on that condition.

''It's a business of making profits, not to give people some life,''
said Al-Hassan Adam, the regional coordinator for National Coalition
Against the Privatization of Water in Accra, Ghana's capital. ''If
private companies come in now and raise tariffs, there will be war.''


Many in this country of 20 million rely on ''water tankers'' run by
deliverers such as Francis Kwesi. The 24-year old sits on his tanker,
waiting for just a few customers. He's one of thousands of water
haulers in Ghana, but he said suppliers have raised prices and he's
facing a tough decision.

''If you raise your price, customers will tell you no, they won't buy
water from you. You are standing there from morning until evening,
and you will not move,'' he said, as fellow drivers nodded in
agreement.

''It's very hard for a young boy like me to get my daily bread,''
Kwesi said, adding that it's difficult to make more than $1 a day.

David Henley, who works on water issues in Africa for the World Bank,
said privatization has led to major efficiency improvements in Ivory
Coast, Senegal, Niger, Chad, and Gabon. In Ghana, he said, ''more
than 50 percent of their water, they don't know what happens to it.''


Analysts of water supply, however, say that while some countries have
benefited from privatization, most such efforts are plagued with
problems.

''What tends to happen is that companies have to put up prices to
cover expenses,'' said David Hall, director of the Public Services
International Research Unit at the University of Greenwich in
England, who has studied water privatization in Africa.

In one research unit report, executives from Vivendi, the French
conglomerate, said private firms are able to invest in water in
Africa if the risks are ''fairly apportioned'' and if the firm is
able to reap a fair profit. One of the sticking points for private
firms: how to cover costs and make a profit without gouging the poor.


Studies by the Public Services International Research Unit, a
research organization at the University of Greenwich outside central
London, show that results of water
privatization throughout West Africa have been mixed:

In Guinea, water quality improved and the number of customers with
water meters went from 5 percent to 90 percent, but prices increased
dramatically.

In parts of South Africa, cholera broke out in several regions when
people, unable to pay for the private water, were forced to use local
public supplies.

In Zimbabwe, the British company Biwater pulled out in 1999 after it
realized consumers could not pay.

Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute in California, which
studies global water issues, said privatization rarely helps the
poorest populations.

''Governments can, as a part of privatization, require that the
poorest populations receive water for free or subsidized, but they
rarely do,'' Gleick said. ''Privatization may
bring some benefits, and many governments in Africa have not
adequately provided water services for their people, but pushing
water privatization without a set of consistent
standards and principles may well worsen, not improve, these
problems.''

In the village of Adenta, just outside the capital, most people
haven't heard of the World Bank, but they know all too well the sting
of water prices. Women carry huge tubs
of water on their heads en route to their houses, pausing to give
Bamba, a toothless man who owns the well, about 7 cents to 9 cents
per tubful.

Some families spend as much as 20 percent of their average daily
income on water. In the United States, by contrast, a minimum-wage
worker who makes just over $1,000
a month might expect to pay $10 to $20 a month, or about 2 percent of
his or her gross wages, according to a team of international experts
who studied Ghana's water problems last year.

T. T. Tettey is one of only a few villagers with a tap in his home,
but it works only once a week for three hours - enough to partially
fill his well. He sells water for about 5 cents a bucket. He voices
concern that, if a private company takes over the system, he will be
forced to pass on the cost to consumers.

''A lot of people won't be able to pay,'' if privatization happens,
Tettey said. ''Sometimes the poor people come and can't afford water.
Any amount they give me, I give them water. ... Eventually, I'll be
the loser.''

***
http://cbc.ca/news/features/water/southafrica.html

Whose hand on the tap?
Water privatization in South Africa

Water is women's work in most of Africa. After the cholera outbreak and the
death of almost 300 people, the local municipality installed new standpipes
for the poor of Empangeni. They now pay a flat rate of 20 Rand a month.

 View larger image
CBC Radio's Bob Carty in Durban, South Africa | February 2003



When apartheid ended, the new government launched a campaign to provide more
water taps. But it also embraced a free-enterprise model for charging
people, even poor people, for water. That has provoked outrage and anger. It
has also brought death.

As CBC Radio producer Bob Carty discovered, the South Africa experience with
water raises questions about whether the market is the best path towards
sustainable development.

 Listen to Bob Carty's report
 Send your thoughts about this report

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"If nothing else, people need water."

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In the eastern South African state of Kwazulu-Natal, there's a massive
aerial migration every late afternoon. Thousands of black birds leave the
shores of the Indian Ocean just south of the border with Mozambique. They
fly inland about 30 kilometres, and for some reason congregate in one large
tree to serenade the sunset.

At the end of each day in Ngwelezane, a partly rural slum of the city of
Empangeni, there are human migrations as well. Men with lunch buckets get
off noisy buses. Women carry baskets of fruit and vegetables back from the
market. Children and their mothers make the trek from their tin and
cinderblock homes to a water standpipe.

"They're filling up quite large buckets which they call 'ee-go-go-go,' which
are 25 or 30 litres," says David Hemson, a field researcher with the
government's Human Science Research Council. Hemson chats, part in English,
part in Zulu, with the women and young girls waiting for their plastic
containers to slowly fill up with water from a brand new stand-pipe.

"It's pretty heavy if you are going to be walking more than 200 metres.
Quite an exhausting task for the women and the younger women as well."

David Hemson: "Bob, you should pick up 25 litres and put it on your head and
just see what if feels like."

CBC's Bob Carty: "It's a good heft isn't it?"

David Hemson: "See if you can get it up on your head and see how far you can
walk."

CBC's Bob Carty: "That's 25 litres?"

David Hemson: "That's 25 kilograms, roughly."

CBC's Bob Carty: "So 50 some-odd pounds. On your head?"

David Hemson: "On your head."

No way, I can't even get the bucket above my shoulders. Meanwhile, a
ten-year old girl beside me, with a little help from a friend, gets one of
the go-go-gos on her head. The other child has a wheelbarrow with three
buckets of water that are probably twice her own weight. They head off down
the road, giggling at the foreigner who can't carry a bucket on his head.

This is how many South Africans get their water every day - many times a
day. But at least they have water. That is largely due to the efforts of the
South African government.


Mike Muller
"We've supplied water to over 7 million people - that's putting
infrastructure in the ground and making sure it works. That's quite good
progress," says Mike Muller, the director-general of the Department of Water
Affairs of South Africa.

His government's achievements in water supply are real and they are
significant. There is not so much a problem of water scarcity here, as there
is a problem of water delivery. Under apartheid, the minority white
population, just 15 per cent of the population, consumed most of the
country's water. One-third of all South Africans had no access to clean
drinking water.

Muller and his department have cut that number in half. They achieved in
just eight years what world leaders only recently pledged to do in other
countries over the next 12 years. Muller is proud of the record.

"If the people have been carrying water for a kilometre or two kilometres,
they'll tell you it's made a tremendous difference," says Muller. "And
certainly, one beats one's own drum, but you can go and look at the
independent research and say 'what's changed in your life?' and certainly in
rural areas and many places many people say we do actually now have water."

Those achievements don't tell the whole story, however. In South Africa,
water has also become a source of anger, protest, impoverishment and death.
It started when apartheid ended in 1994.


Nelson Mandela
 Read more about Mandela
When Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) came to power,
former political prisoners and guerrilla fighters took over cabinet posts
and top bureaucratic offices. They wrote a new constitution, one that's
unique in recognizing access to drinking water as a right of citizenship.
Poor South Africans expected great change.

But David McDonald, the director of development studies at Queen's
University, says they didn't get it. He spends a lot of time in South Africa
coordinating the Municipal Services Project, a research network supported by
universities, think tanks and trade unions.

McDonald says that after taking power, ANC leaders began to change. They
didn't apply the socialist remedies to problems that many had expected.
Instead they decided to try to correct the injustices of apartheid with free
market capitalism.


Thabo Mbeki
"There was quite a dramatic change in thinking and it started at the top,"
says McDonald. "People like Nelson Mandela were saying 'privatization is the
fundamental policy of our government. Call me a Thatcherite if you will.'
And his successor, Thabo Mbeki, famously said 'I am a Thatcherite.'

"But there's also been a lot of pressure from the World Bank. The World Bank
has been extremely active working with municipalities and national
government, advising particularly on urban policy, saying we're going to
fund you if you do this."

The "this" included the privatization of water delivery. It was a
philosophical sea-change. Water would become just like any other commodity,
to be sold for profit on the open market. Water managers would have to
recover the real costs of providing the service, what they call "full cost
recovery."

Mike Muller was the man put in charge of that free-market policy, an ironic
role for a former Marxist, but one that Muller has embraced.

"The policy for cost recovery is an absolutely sensible way of running a
water system and the way most water systems run in the world," he says. "It
costs money to provide it and why should one half pay of the public pay for
the other half to have vast quantities of water to use. If people don't pay
for it, eventually the municipalities will go bankrupt. And if that is the
case, it means if you provide free full services to some you are actually
taking away basic services from others.

Quick facts

About 34,000 people die each day worldwide due to diseases related to water,
feces and dirt, such as cholera and infant diarrhea. In developing
countries, 80 per cent of illnesses are water related.
(Source: Environment Canada)

 More water statistics
"You know there's a slogan which we use which I'm pleased to see it up on
billboards around town at the moment. It says "some for all, not all for
some."

The new policy of cost recovery was applied everywhere in South Africa,
though in different ways. Some cities simply turned their water utilities
over to gigantic French and British water corporations. Elsewhere, utilities
that remained public were forced to reduce subsidies and operate like a
private business. There are differences in the two models, but poor South
Africans just call the whole process privatization - Water for Profit -
because that's what they experience in their daily lives.

In an area called Ngwelezane, lives a community of 20,000 to 30,000 working
class people, some scratching a living from small gardens, sugar plantations
and the like.

David Hemson drives me around Ngwelezane's cratered mud roads to explain how
the water policy worked out there. Eighty per cent of residents have to get
water from standpipes. Until 1997, the municipality paid. Then cost recovery
kicked in. The first step was to charge people for water they used to get
for free. One of the stated goals was to stop people from wasting water.


Social researcher David Hemson of the Human Science Reserarch Council (left)
talks with a local official of the Empangeni municipality about pre-paid
water metres like this one. Now dismantled, in 2000, the introduction of the
pre-paid metres was one of factors leading people to take water from unclean
streams and ponds which lead to the worst cholera outbreak in decades.
Hemson says that was a wrong-headed idea from the start.

"You can see basically it's a very poor community. People are suffering from
a very high level of AIDS and other diseases; and people who are poor are
actually very careful about water," he says. "In many of the communities
I've been to people say we are limiting everybody to two buckets of water a
day and that's it. That's voluntary. They have too low expectations of the
amount of the water they should have because that's well below international
standards."

When water bills started showing up, people ignored them. Many simply
couldn't afford to pay the amounts charged. So the local water utility
decided to make people pay before they got their water.

David Hemson stops in front of an odd looking device beside the road. It's a
rectangular cement box with a water pipe running into it and various wires
and gears inside. It's a pre-paid water meter.

"This is a Bumpenaze water meter, which works by putting in a card in the
system and then you get so many litres," explains Hemson. "When you pull the
card out, it stops. They put these in instead of taps which people could
open and close themselves. It was quite capricious. Quite often it would
break down and you'd not get water and you would lose your money at the same
time."

"The pre-paid meter is without a doubt the most insidious device," says
David McDonald of the Municipal Services Project. "What it does is create a
self-imposed cut off. Somebody will go out and say, 'Well I can only afford
40 Rands worth of water this month and therefore that is all that I am going
to buy.' And that may have absolutely no relationship to what they actually
need to lead healthy and productive lives. The municipality loves it and
private sector providers love it because it avoids the kindsof hassles and
costs associated with trying to collect the money and it also deflects the
bad publicity away from them of having to go in and cut them off."

Two years ago last August, most of the pre-paid water meters in Ngwelezane
had broken down. Meanwhile the local water utility took a more aggressive
approach to households with their own water pipes which had fallen behind in
their payments. They were cut off. Locks were put on their meters. "No
money - no water," the water managers told the people of Ngwelezane.

That is how a tragedy started.

"Down below we see the Lake Emshulatuzi, which is highly polluted," says
Hemson. "The people who found there had been locks put on their taps were
forced to go back to the original sources, either the lake or the river."

But of course the nearby lakes and rivers were cauldrons of bacteria, one of
them the bacteria that causes cholera. It infects the intestine, causing
diarrhea, vomiting, leg cramps, and the rapid loss of body fluids leads to
dehydration and shock. Death can occur within hours.

This would be the worst cholera outbreak in South Africa's recent history.


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"It was devastating.
The cost has been tremendous.
This has been a real disaster zone."

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"We're looking at about just below 300 people dying from cholera, about
350,000 people were affected," says Hemson. "There were emergency hospitals
set up, tents were set up for re-hydration purposes. It was devastating. The
cost has been tremendous - and just imagine if all that money had been spent
on providing services in the first place. This has been a real disaster
zone."

And that, at the cost of almost 300 lives, is how the people of Ngwelezane
came to get a new standpipe and a low, flat rate for their water.

For the government of South Africa, the cholera epidemic is a sore point, an
outbreak of a disease associated with the old days of colonialism, not the
new democratic South Africa. Water Affairs Director Mike Muller refuses to
accept that his government's policies may have been to blame.

Mike Muller: "Our impression is that people drew conclusions about the
cholera outbreak which weren't really justified. Cholera sweeps down the
east coast of Africa every 10 to 20 years. The linkage that was made is not
really backed up by fact."

CBC's Bob Carty: "So, no responsibility in government policy for the cholera
situation?"

Mike Muller: "I come to the statement: the pandemic of Cholera comes down
the east African coast every 10-20 years and this was one more. South Africa
at the moment cannot provide, free full services to everybody."

Researchers like David Hemson disagree.

Yes, there have been previous cholera outbreaks, but this one claimed ten
times more victims than the last major outbreak. Hemson also rejects the
claim that South Africa couldn't afford to give people free water. The
national government, he notes, is spending millions on tax cuts for the
wealthy and on defence. And at the time of the tragedy, the local water
utility had millions of dollars in the bank even as it cut water off in
Ngwelezane.

Hemson lays the blame for the cholera outbreak and the deaths squarely on
the government's free-market policy.

"That was the direct cause of the cholera epidemic. There is no doubt about
that," he says. "This is a neo-liberal policy, which in a sense is quite
surprising because you'd imagine in a majority-rule government you would
want to see the poorest of the poor, which of course is the black majority,
would be getting the benefits of the new system. But it's not happening as
yet."

South Africa

Population:
43,647,658 (July 2002 est.)

Life expectancy:
45.43 years

People living with HIV/AIDS:
5.2 million (2000 est.)

 Source: CIA World Factbook
Another impact of water privatization can be found at the other end of South
Africa, in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town.

"The one truck is the security for the Uni-city, the other is the boys which
they use to cut off the water," says Cecilia Davis, a resident of this
township, as we drive behind two white vans from the Uni-city government.
The trucks are the water enforcers. "These are the people that come in and
cut the water off of people. They're going to lose their water and they
don't know what to do. What they are going to do without the water?"

Ahead, the two vans stop in front of a small house. Two armed security
guards get out of one truck. Out of the other jump six men with wrenches and
hammers. The workers lift up a water covering on the street, and start
hammering and twisting the values of the meter going into the home. A burly,
armed security officer stands guard.

CBC's Bob Carty: "What are you doing here?"

Security Guard: "Cutting off the water supply."

CBC's Bob Carty: "For what reason?"

Security Guard: "I don't know. You must speak to the people in the civic
centre. I'm not the spokesperson for the city council."

CBC's Bob Carty: "How many of these do you do a day?"

Security Guard: "I told you, I'm not the spokesperson for the city council.
You must speak to the people in the civic centre of water works."

The security guard writes down my license plate number and radios it in to
his office.

In 15 minutes the job is done. The residents of the household are now like
thousands of others in the township who are fortunate enough to have water
pipes coming into their homes, but no running water. Professor David
McDonald says this has become all too common a ritual across South Africa.

"Our estimate, based on a large national survey that we did in 2001, is that
as many as 10 million people have had their water cut off since 1994," he
says. "Some of that has been very short term, but some of this has been for
months and months on end."

In fact, it has almost been 12 months for Cecilia Davis herself.

"I am opening the tap but there is no water coming out. None. Not even a
little bit," she says.

Davis is a single mother with four children still at home. Home is a cold,
dark, three-room cement shelter, with no water.

Cecilia Davis: "Nothing whatsoever. It's making a noise instead of letting
water come out because the water has been cut off, the meter was removed,
almost a year."

CBC's Bob Carty: Almost a year? So how do you get water?"

Cecilia Davis: "I get water from opposite neighbour with the pots."

Quick facts

About 1.1 billion people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking
water.

About 2.4 billion do not have access to sanitation.

(Source: UN Environment Programme)

 More water statistics
Davis' life now revolves around fetching water from the neighbours - one pot
for breakfast, one to flush the toilet, ten to do the washing, then lunch
and bathing the children, and then the toilet again.

Davis has no income, just the support of neighbours and family. That's not
uncommon here in the townships where 60 per cent are unemployed. In recent
years, the city raised Cecilia's monthly water bill by 300 per cent. She
couldn't pay it. And even though she had two sick children in the house, the
city cut her water off. It wasn't what she expected from the post-apartheid
governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

"Before the new government, they weren't doing these things," says Davis.
"Ever since the new government took over, all the things went wrong. And I'm
very, very disappointed in the government of South Africa really. I don't
think Mr. Thabo Mbeki is a fair person. I don't think so."


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"It is not the work of the private sector.
It is political."

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But government officials and their supporters say the problem is not
government policy, but people's attitudes.

Vivendi Water, based in France, is the largest private water corporation in
the world. Yves Picaud, the managing director of Vivendi Water in South
Africa, says his company is interested in expanding its operations in South
Africa, but only after the government changes popular attitudes about paying
or not paying for water.

"There is a culture of non-payment because during the apartheid time the ANC
told the people in the townships, 'Don't pay anything for electricity, for
water, because this comes from the white people,'" says Picaud. "Still, this
culture is there. When you don't pay for something, you don't care. People
have to pay something, maybe very little, (but) something. There is also a
huge responsibility from the present government to explain that you should
pay for water, you should pay for electricity. This is not the work of the
private sector. This is political."


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"People are telling us they have to choose between water and food."

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But others are not so sure a so-called "culture of non-payment" is the
problem. Even World Bank experts say that around the world, poor people stop
paying for water when it costs more than 5 per cent of their income. For
South Africa's poor, it often costs up to 20 per cent.

David McDonald of the Municipal Services Project says that in his surveys
half of South Africa's poor cannot pay for water at current rates without
giving up something else equally essential, like food or education.

McDonald suggests there may be a hidden agenda here. Cape Town, along with a
number of other major cities, has been discussing the sale of its water
utility to one of the big water multinationals.

McDonald contends that the cutoffs are a prelude ot complete privatization.

"No private company is interested in going in and taking over a service
where only 50 per cent of people are paying for what they receive," he says.
"Municipalities know this and this is why they end up doing the dirty work.
They end up being the ones brow-beating people into paying their bills,
cutting off their services, kicking them out of their homes and so on. Once
all the dirty work is done, they will often just hand it over to the private
sector.

On August 31, 2002, twenty thousand protestors marched and sang their way
through the streeets of Alexandra, a very poor slum in Johannesburg, just a
few kilometres from the affluence of Sandton, the site of the World Summit
on Sustainable Development. Many of the protestors where there to protest
the policies of the South African government, including the privatization of
water.

Among the demonstrators was Ashwin Desai, a teacher from Durban, with a long
list of complaints against the ANC government.

Listen to an audio clip of Ashwin Desai (Runs 0:40)
"People are very angry. You're starting to see the same kind of
anti-apartheid techniques that were used in the '80s and '90s now being used
against the South African government, the ANC. People are going out at night
and reconnecting water supplies and electricity supplies illegally.

"These aren't just the kind of radical youth, these are the grandmothers and
the grandfathers and the aunties and uncles who are out there on the front
lines, saying this is wrong. There is an enormous amount of anger and a
growing amount of anger in South Africa."

Signs of those anti-apartheid tactics are right outside Cecilia Davis' home
in Cape Town - black marks on the road.

Cecilia Davis: "We started to oppose them by starting burning the tires.
Setting tires a light here."

CBC's Bob Carty: "You had tires burning right here, with what, gasoline on
them?"

Cecilia Davis: "Petrol we threw on them, to stop them cutting the people's
water."

CBC's Bob Carty: "A lot of black smoke?"

Cecilia Davis: "Took me three days to get the blackness out of my hair from
burning tires. We were very angry that day, that I can assure you. We were
very angry that day."

That anger echoes across South Africa. In Johannesburg, during the World
Summit on Sustainable Development, 20,000 demonstrators were in the street,
many with placards saying: "Our water is not for sale."


An anti-privatization demonstration outside Wits University in Johannesburg,
South Africa in September 2002. The Anti-Privatization Movement opposes
moves by the government to privatize water and electricity services.

 View larger image
In part because of protests like that, and in part because of the cholera
epidemic, the South African government has changed its water policy. There
is still cost recovery, but there is also now a pledge to provide a minimum
level of water daily free of charge, according Water Department Director
Mike Muller.

"We have had to confront the fact that in a very unequal society like South
Africa, a policy of cost recovery, which makes perfect sense in a more
equitable society, would exclude the poor from access to that basic
commodity to which they have a right," says Muller. "At the moment, what we
are trying to assure that all South Africans is get a bucket of water a day,
25 litres per person, and adequate sanitation.

"The real challenge is that we do have many people living in houses with
full services who don't have the income to pay for those services. We have a
real social challenge."

The private water companies are not happy with that. And neither are poor
people. Many say they have yet to see their minimum daily amount of free
water.

I asked people about this wherever I went. I asked David Hemson, the
government field researcher back in Ngwelezane where cholera broke out. And
I asked Cecilia Davis in Cape Town and people in Alexandra Township where
the protest took place. None had seen the 25 litres of free water per
person, per day that is promised by the government.

According to many researchers, many of the problems of the old apartheid
remain, and now there is a new apartheid, a water apartheid. You see it most
dramatically with the trickler.

"People are not happy because water is people's basic need," says Olin
Naidoo, who lives in a township on the outskirts of Durban. "If nothing
else, people need water. If they don't need anything else, they desperately
need water."


Olin Naidoo (above) holds a "trickler" - a button-like device that lets only
a small amount of water flow thorugh a tap through two tiny eyelets. Like
most residents of the working class areas of Durban, she has taken her
trickler out.

Audio clip of CBC's Bob Carty talking to Olin Naidoo about the trickler
(Runs 1:03)

Naidoo is a worker at a nearby candy factory. She is also a community
activist. She demonstrates the latest technology in her neighbourhood's
water wars. It's a tiny but effective device deployed by both public
utilities and private water corporations in South Africa. Because water
managers, public and private alike, believe poor people waste water, and
because it seems the poor can't pay for water, they should have only limited
access to water - not a cut-off, just a limitation.

Hence, the trickler.

Olin Naidoo: "The tricker is a device with a little hole that sends water in
drips into your tap."

CBC's Bob Carty: "It's sort of like a blockage they put in the pipe?"

Olin Naidoo: "Yes, it's sort of a blockage with a few tiny holes and that is
the way it drips."

CBC's Bob Carty: "What can you do with that?"

Olin Naidoo: "It takes you 15 before you get a cup full of water to drink.
And it takes you maybe two hours before you can have a good bath. You have
to get up at two in the morning if you start work at six."

CBC's Bob Carty: "Why are they doing this?"

Olin Naidoo: "Because people in our community are very poor and we can't
afford to pay."

CBC's Bob Carty: "And how have people reacted to this?"

Olin Naidoo: "Well, most of the people have taken out the trickler because
it's obvious if people can't afford food they must at least been given the
privilege to clean water."

While Olin Naidoo and her neighbours have all taken the tricklers out, the
private water corporations and the public utilities are still putting them
in. Cost recovery policies remain in place and the water multinationals are
still eager to take over more public water utilities.

Ironically, water is a political flash point in South Africa, not so much
because of who owns the waterworks but because of the values governing the
way it is delivered. Increasingly those values are market driven, rigid, and
punitive. So while water could have been a way to engender confidence and
trust in the public sector there, and in the government's promises of social
justice and the citizens' right to clean drinking water, instead, the liquid
of life has become a source of conflict, division, and distrust.