Demand A Clean Water System

Africa has now 19 cities with populations of more than one million inhabitants. Because of slow economic growth, lack of effective development policies and limited resources, the development of infrastructure has not kept up with the increasing needs for shelter and services in growing urban populations.

Poor hygiene, inadequate management of waste and lack of sanitation facilities are contributing factors in the death of millions of people in the developing world due to diseases that are easily preventable. For example, lack of sanitation and inadequate disposal or storage of waste near houses can provide habitats for vectors responsible for several infectious diseases such as amebiasis, typhoid fever and diarrhea. Uncontrolled and inadequate landfills are a danger to the environment and a health risk to the population since they may lead to contamination of water and soil. The health risks associated with poor sanitation tend to be higher in densely populated low-income urban areas. At a global level, more than 5 million people die each year from diseases related to inadequate waste disposal systems. Contamination of water leads to a whole range of diarrheal diseases such as cholera that kills 1.8 million people worldwide. An estimated 90 percent among them are children below five, mainly from developing countries. Most of the burden can be attributed to unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene practices. According to UNICEF, Infant Mortality Rates (IMRs) are almost always higher in poor urban areas than the national average and than those in rural areas. A great proportion of the high mortality among the children of the urban poor can be attributed to diseases common in urban areas such as diarrhea, tuberculosis and parasitic diseases (intestinal worms) that are frequently associated with lack of safe water and sanitation.

Africa has the lowest water supply and sanitation coverage of any other region in the world. It is estimated that one in three Africans has no access to improved water or to sanitation facilities and the number of people lacking those basic services is increasing. The majority of those lacking basic services live in informal or suburban areas and rural communities. Unless actions are taken now, the absolute number of people lacking basic services will increase from 200 million in 2000 to 400 million in 2020.

Many Sub-Saharan countries will find it difficult to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set for 2015, particularly the MDG 7 which stipulates to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/challenges-of-water-access-in-africa/

The Damn Dam

Fall of the dictatorial military regime in 1991 brought little relief to the Ethiopians. Gross human rights violation, underdevelopment, poverty and starvation still remain. Famines still continue to strike and unemployment continues to soar. There is no freedom of expression in Ethiopia and media in this African nation is tightly regulated.

Ethiopians want to know how would the mega Grand Renaissance Dam help them apart from generating 6,000 MW of hydro electricity.  They want to know what benefit will the mega dam bring to the country which is one of the poorest in the world and when the nation is in absolute need of small “micro-dams” for "irrigation to ensure food security for its hunger-stricken population."

Over seventy per cent of the power the project will generate will be sold to Djibouti, Sudan and Kenya which is expected to generate a net profit of over 300 million euros every year while Ethiopians will continue to starve, die of hunger, struck intermittently by famines and slide deeper into  poverty.

The price to be paid by the Mursi, Suri and Bodi agro-pastoralists and others — those damned by the dam — is dislocation, displacement, destruction of traditional ways of life, persecution, loss of ancestral lands, starvation, conflict and potential extinction.

The Grand Renaissance Dam is also exacerbating the deterioration of the geo-political situation in the Nile basin, especially between Egypt and Ethiopia, and may possibly lead to a war over the Nile and bring devastating consequences in Ethiopia.

 The Grand Renaissance Dam will benefit only a handful — the Ethiopian elite -  who, according to a report of the Global Financial Integrity, siphoned 11.7 billion euros out of the country between 2000 and 2009. 

Zambia's watered down election promise

United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that about 4.8 million of Zambia's 13 million people do not have access to safe drinking water. 6.6 million people are without access to proper sanitation. Drinking river water is not a safe practice and is fraught with danger and disease and is infested with black flies, which harbour a parasite known as nematode or roundworm. When these parasites are transmitted to a human they cause River Blindness and then there is bilharzia, a tropical disease that causes one’s skin to itch. Other symptoms include diarrhoea, fever, vomiting and blood in the urine.

The Patriotic Front was elected to government in September 2011 and in the election campaign, President Michael Sata’s PF promised to provide hand pumps and community latrines to those who lacked them. The party also promised that within 90 days of the new government’s taking office, people in rural areas would have access to safe drinking water. But now, almost nine months later but many wonder if the commitment to change the lives of those living in rural Zambia will ever materialise.

The Water Grab

Few countries in Africa have received more foreign interest in their farmland than those served by the Nile River. The Nile, Africa's longest river, is a lifeline especially for Egypt, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda. This economically, ecologically and politically fragile Nile basin is now the target of a new wave of large-scale agriculture projects. Three of the main countries in the basin, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan have, together, already leased out millions of hectares in the basin and are offering more. To bring this land into production, all of it will need to be irrigated. Ethiopia is the source of some 80% of the Nile water.

Those who have been buying up vast stretches of farmland in recent years, whether based in Dubai or City of London, understand that it's the access to water that they get from the land deals, which they often get for free and without restriction, that may well be worth the most over the long-term. "The value is not in the land," says Neil Crowder, whose UK-based company, Chayton Capital, has been acquiring farmland in Zambia. "The real value is in water.” And water is abundant in Africa, according to those behind the hundreds of large farmland deals that have been signed across Africa. They say the continent's water resources are vastly under-utilised, and they want to harness them for their agriculture projects. A closer look at where these deals are taking place and how much water they plan to consume shows that the projects will rob millions of people of their access to water and risk to deplete the continent's most precious fresh water sources.

The Nile
In its Gambela region on the border with South Sudan, corporations such as Karuturi from India and Saudi Star from Saudi Arabia are already building big irrigation channels that will massively increase Ethiopia's withdrawal of water from the Nile. And these are just two of the actors involved. One calculation suggests that if all the land that the country has leased out is brought under production and irrigation it will increase the country's use of freshwater resources for agriculture by a factor of nine. Further downstream, in South Sudan and Sudan, some 4.9 million hectares of land has been leased out to foreign corporations since 2006. That is more than the size of the whole of the Netherlands. And further up north, Egypt is also leasing out land and implementing its own new irrigation projects. Of course, it remains to be seen how much of all this will actually be brought into production and under irrigation, but it is difficult to imagine that the Nile can handle this onslaught. Reliable figures on how much irrigation is actually possible and sustainable are difficult to find. The FAO, in various publications and in its Aquastat database, gives figures on 'irrigation potential' and actual irrigation by country and river basin. FAO establishes 8 million hectares as the total 'maximum value' available for total irrigation in all 10 countries of the Nile basin. But the 4 countries mentioned above already have irrigation infrastructure established for 5.4 million hectares and have now leased out a further 8.6 million hectares of land where irrigation will be developed.

The Niger

Another part of Africa targeted by agribusiness is the lands along the Niger River, West Africa's biggest river. Mali, Niger and Nigeria are the countries most dependent on the river, but seven other countries in the Niger basin share its water. It is also extremely fragile as it has suffered from man-made interventions such as dams, irrigation and pollution. Water experts estimate that the volume of the Niger has shrunk by one-third during the last three decades alone. In Mali, the river spreads out into a vast inland delta which constitutes Mali's main agricultural zone and one of the region's most important wetlands. It is here where many of the land grabbing projects are concentrated. The Office du Niger presides over the irrigation of over 70,000 ha, mainly for the production of rice. It is the largest irrigation scheme in West Africa, and it uses a substantial part of all the river's water, especially during the dry season. Back in the 1990s, the FAO put Mali's potential to irrigate from the Niger at a bit over half a million ha. But now, due to increased water scarcity, independent experts conclude that the whole of Mali has the water capacity to irrigate only 250,000 ha. Yet the Malian government has already signed away 470,000 ha to foreign companies from Libya, China, the UK, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the past few years, and is offering much more.

The Nile and the Niger basins are just two of the areas where land and water rights are massively being given away. The Ethiopian government is constructing a dam in the Omo River to generate electricity and irrigate a huge sugar-cane plantation – a project that threatens hundreds of thousands of indigenous people that depend on the river further downstream. It also threatens to empty the world’s biggest desert lake, fed by the Omo River, Lake Turkana. In Kenya, a tremendous controversy has arisen from the government's plans to hand out huge areas of land in the delta of the Tana River with disastrous implications for the local communities depending on the delta's water.The already degraded Senegal River basin and its delta have been subject to hundreds of thousands of hectares in land deals, putting foreign agribusiness in direct competition for the water with local farmers. The list goes on and is growing by the day.

The areas where land grabbing is concentrated in Africa coincide almost completely with the continent's largest river and lake systems, and in most of these areas irrigation is a prerequisite of commercial production. If this land and water grab is not put to an end, millions of Africans are going to lose access to water sources which they need for their livelihoods, as they are moved out of the areas where land/water deals have been agreed to, or simply see the access to their traditional water sources blocked by newly built fences, canals and dikes that are owned by someone else. There is simply not enough water in Africa's rivers and water tables to provide irrigation for all of the large-scale agriculture projects that foreign companies are pursuing. If and when they are put under production, these 21st century industrial plantations will rapidly destroy, deplete and pollute water sources across the continent. Such models of agricultural production have generated enormous problems of soil degradation, salinisation and water logging wherever they have been applied. Africa is in no shape for such an imposition. Over one in three Africans live with water scarcity, and the continent's food production is set to suffer more than any other from climate change.

If the goal is to increase food production, then there is ample evidence that this can be most effectively done by building on the traditional water management and soil conservation systems of local communities, and by strengthening collective and customary rights over land and water sources

What water shortage? What energy crisis?

Water is a saleable commodity underr capitalism. And, of course, the first thing is to declare that water is a scarce resource and that there exists a shortage of water, a water "crisis" that only capitalism remedies with a price-rationing. The fiction of water shortage in Africa has been a multi-million dollar business.

Much of the conquest of Africa by colonial powers was to reach the source of the Nile and always central to imperial objectives in Africa, requiring the water to support colonial mining, agriculture and industrial uses to the detriment of the vast majority of the peoples. Settler colonialists consumed vast amounts of water for irrigation, sprinkling elegant gardens and for their swimming pools while there was water shortage for the majority. Irrigation schemes had been established by the settlers to provide water for the farms and the political and economic power of settlers. During the period of apartheid, the minority government in cooperation with the World Bank invested in the Lesotho High Water Dam to dispossess the people of Lesotho for industries and big corporate entities in South Africa. As in South Africa, so all over Africa these schemes benefited the rich. And there the negative lessons from the old forms of capitalist industrialization, as witnessed the obscene waste of the Arab Sheiks in the Emirates who are building mega projects based on the salinization of water.

Today we are now being told the truth about the abundance of water resources in Africa."Huge water resource exists under Africa ... Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface. The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource."

 In reality, the publication by the British scientists on the large underground supplies of water should not be news. The scientists collated their information from existing hydro-geological maps from national governments as well as 283 aquifer studies.  It is the kind of work that should have been undertaken by the Economic Commission for Africa and the commissions of the African Union.

The fact that Libya has the highest storage of ground water in Africa has been known by the people of Libya and the people of North Africa. It is for this reason that the government of Libya had embarked on the great water transfer scheme to harness the resources of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. The Libyan state had invested $25 billion in the Great Man-made River Project, a complex 4,000-km long water pipeline buried beneath the desert that could transport two million cubic metres of water a day. The objective of this, (up to 2011) the largest engineering project in Africa was to turn Libya - a nation that is 95 per cent desert - into a food self-sufficient arable oasis.

African policy makers and planners also know that in Africa there are abundant freshwater resources in large rivers and lakes such as the Congo, Nile and Zambezi River basins and in Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world. However, there are great disparities in water availability and use within and between African countries, because the water resources are so unevenly distributed. In regards to the nile , the mal-distribution can be traced back to colonial-dated water treaties.

This fabrication of water shortage had been successfully sold to the point where the idea of providing clean water for all in Africa is reproduced as part of ‘aid’ packages. reproducing the story about food shortages as the story of water risks provided a good foundation for the multibillion dollar aid industry. Food and water ‘security’ became interwoven. Under Millenium Development Goals,  number 7C to "Half, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation" that can only be reached by more neo-liberalism and by opening up African resources to international capital. The World Bank continues to promote the privatization of water resources and support giant water projects that dispossess the working peoples of the urban and rural areas. The World Bank have been at the forefront of the struggles over the ideas of whether water should remain a public good, shared by humans everywhere, or a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.  This same struggle over water has taken place elsewhere in the world and intensified in Latin America where the struggles of the Bolivian people are now legendary. There is deep dispute over water as a source of life for the common good, as opposed to water being understood as an economic "good"  – a commodity to be bought and sold.

The unification of the water resources of Africa is one of the primary bases for African unity with a system of canals linking rivers and lakes in the kind of infrastructure planning that ensures that all will have water. It is socialist planning at the Pan African level which can make water for all a reality. The Nile water shed,  the Congo River basin, the Mano River basin, the Niger River societies and the societies of the Zambezi and Orange rivers there is need for planning so that there is a new concept of integration and unity. These rivers, lakes and underground water resources are commonly owned by all of the peoples.

In the socialism the reconstruction and transformation of Africa will mobilize the energy, skills and talents of all Africans so that the peoples can believe in the ideas of African and World Unity. This vision of reforestation and healing the African environment by the Great Green Wall (a 15km wide and 7000km long swath of land from Djibouti in the east and stretching to Senegal in the West and passing through Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania, can mobilize millions of workers, youths and engineers for a new sense of priorities for Africa. Advances in solar energy technology, harnessing the underground water resources, the electrification of Africa and an infrastructure of canal systems await Africa. Such projects places the concept of One People at the level where it touches concretely the lives of the people.

The management of water and water resources continues to be at the top of the list of re-construction. But also ready to be tackled by socialist democratisation are health, electrification and energy,  infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, canals, and airports), education, agriculture and aquaculture, housing, and information and computer technology. It is time for a complete break from the old forms of "development" and industrialization that threaten to destroy the planet Earth.

The African continent has abundant supplies of water and energy. Among the ample renewable energy resources; hydraulic energy, solar energy, wind energy,  the tidal energy and volcanic thermal energy. It is now possible to plan for the mobilization of the physical and "spiritual" energy of people and with these abundant resources create a new world. The politics of transformation of Africa requires a new politics among the people.

Adapted from here

It won't wash

It will take two centuries for sub-Saharan Africa to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, according to NGO WaterAid.

“Diarrhoea, 90 percent of which is attributable to inadequate sanitation and dirty water, is the single biggest killer of children in Africa, and yet sanitation targets are off-track,” Tom Slaymaker, one of the report’s authors.

Every day, 2,000 children die from diarrhoea in sub-Saharan Africa. Four out of 10 people do not have access to safe water, while seven out of 10 do not have appropriate sanitation facilities.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are being sidelined as governments concentrate on health and education. It is not a sexy topic - politicians much prefer to say they're opening a hospital or school, rather than building some toilets.

In Ethiopia, 193,000 deaths per year are WASH-related, and 71.4 million people have no access to sanitation facilities. Similar figures apply to Mali, Niger, Benin, Ghana and Congo, where 194,000 deaths a year are WASH-related and 49.5 million people have no access to sanitation facilities.

According to WaterAid, the Côte d'Ivoire administration targeted 0.06 percent of its GDP to water and sanitation, Ghana spent 0.29 percent, Liberia 0.28 percent, Madagascar 0.28 percent, Nigeria 0.18 percent, Uganda 0.41 percent and Zambia 0.56 percent. African governments need to commit at least 3.5 percent of GDP to sanitation and water to get back on track,

Over one billion people will miss the global MDG sanitation target if things continue unchanged In Asia, India will not reach its MDG on sanitation before 2047, while Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal will not achieve the target before 2028.

water rights

At present, there are 2.6 billion people living without safe sanitation, which means countless communities where people are exposed to their own and others’ faeces. Excreta is then transmitted between people by flies or fingers and also finds its way into water sources, resulting in a public health crisis.

In Africa, diarrhoea kills almost one in five children before their fifth birthday.

According to the 2009 census, an estimated one in five Kenyans uses the bush as a toilet - access to piped water covers only 38.4 percent of the urban population and 13.4 percent of rural residents. With Kenya’s population projected to grow by up to one million people per year, existing water and sanitation facilities will be stretched further. Rapid urbanization has meant more informal structures with little or no water and sanitation services are springing up. Slum conditions may make the settlements a breeding ground for tomorrow’s pathogens. Already, health problems such as malnutrition, diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid fever are common, especially when water is mixed with industrial and sewage effluent.

A "deadly financing gap"

Poor sanitation and bad hygiene cause the deaths of one in five Liberians, according to the World Health Organization.Diarrhoea kills 20 percent of children who die aged five or under in Liberia according an Oxfam report.

Three out of four Liberians have no access to safe drinking water and six out of seven cannot access sanitation facilities, such as toilets.

Water and sanitation receives less funding than health, education, transport, energy and agriculture, according to the global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking Water

water crisis in Africa

UNICEF noted that more than 155 million people, or 39 percent of the population in West and Central Africa, do not have access to potable water, with only eight of 24 countries in the region on track to meet key poverty-reduction targets by 2015.Six countries have less than 50 percent drinking water coverage: Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, Mauritania and Sierra Leone. Many countries have suffered drops in food production due to erratic rains.

UNICEF said the water situation in West and Central Africa "remains a major concern," with the region home to the lowest coverage of potable water worldwide.

Also of concern is the fact that 291 million people have absolutely no access to sanitation in West and Central Africa, the region with the highest under-five mortality rate of all developing regions at 169 child deaths per 1,000 live births.

"...it depends on your ability to pay…"

"We have a water problem"

You have to buy water or you have to draw water yourself… We get water from far away, because if you are getting it from up there at Chemichemi springs…everyone is at that place… It is just a ditch and that ditch used by all the people in this area. Everyone has to form a line and it takes many hours...If you do not have water, you have to pay 300 shillings and that represents school fees, so we have a water problem. There are those people who have dug wells and there are those who have taps, so it depends on your ability [to pay]… If you have money, about 10,000 shillings, you can connect pipes to your house.The tap water comes on in one area at a time. For example, it may be available in the part with the hospital, but there is none this side [of Kimana] - but we understand… I have neighbours whom God has helped and they have tap water and also pumped water. They sell it. One container is 2 shillings. You are forced to buy it - if you do not want the water from the ditch you have to buy it.

Water , water everywhere but not a drop to drink

An estimated 84,000 Ghanaians dying each year from diseases related to poor water quality . The Ghana Water Company says it is no longer able to supply even half of the 150 million gallons of water that people in the capital , Accra, require each day.

Accra could have an abundant water supply from the nearby Volta Lake, the world's largest manmade body of fresh water. But many of the pipes delivering the water to the city are cracked and broken and the government has done little to repair them. As a result many residents resort to polluted rivers and ponds, or hand-dug wells where the water is often unclean.

The government acknowledges the problem. “It’s about aging infrastructure, lack of investment and waste,” the minister for water resources, Boniface Abubakar Saddique told IRIN . To raise more capital for infrastructure the ministry restructured the way it managed water in 2006, handing control over to a private company, Aqua Vitens Rand Limited. Two years later, however, fewer people in Accra can access water than when the system was government-run .

A representative of the non-governmental organisation ISODEC (Integrated Social Development Centre) said , “Its sad politicians constantly spew rhetoric on providing potable water to citizens but never offer concrete alternatives.”

The government intends to purchase two executive jets at a cost of US$105 million . At least , the workers of Ghana now know the President's priority.

In Burkina Faso 5.7 million Burkinabes have no access to clean water and 12.6 million lack adequate sanitation facilities. In some parts of the country only 2 percent of the population has access to clean toilets .

The government said it will use the African Development Bank, World Bank and bilateral donor funds to install 617,000 new toilets around the country, build 520 new pipe networks in rural areas, fit water taps in over 100,000 homes and install thousands of water-pumps.
"Finally the international community is realising that any development initiatives introduced in Burkina Faso must include investments in water, otherwise the Millennium Development Goals will be doomed to failure." the non-governmental organization WaterAid told IRIN.

A Water War ?

Colonial era treaties granting rights to water from Nile tributaries to Egypt are leaving Ethiopian farms without access to irrigation. As dry seasons grow longer in the arid plains of Eastern Kenya and Ethiopia, tribal conflict over access to watering holes is on the rise, exacerbated by the proliferation of arms from neighboring Somalia.

While Americans fret over rising gas prices and global tension over oil, the world’s poor are struggling to secure access to another, even more basic resource Water . Water scarcity in East Africa is fueling conflict and thwarting development , it is reported

With clean water access increasingly scarce, the burden of securing a daily water supply has become a daunting task for women and young children who often spend hours a day carrying water for their families from remote locations.

Kenya Water Crisis Looms
A crisis posing a risk to 35,000 people is looming in the north and south-east over water scarcity and pressure on grazing pastures.

"For pastoralist communities, scarcity of water for people signals hunger because livestock, their only source of food and income, are at greater risk," warned Enrico Eminae , ActionAid Coordinator in the north east region . "It also triggers conflict over resources as people from different clans crisscross each others territory in search of pasture and water", he added.

Pastoralists are putting pressure on the neighbouring villages of Darwed, Didkuro and Wangaidahan in search of alternative livelihoods. Pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and western Somalia are even more affected and there is danger of them migrating to Kenya causing stress on already strained resources

Lifestraw

Made of polystyrene, the 31cm long, 2.9cm diametre, 150g tube, which looks like a flute and can be hung around the neck, uses filters to kill or remove 99.9 percent of waterborne bacteria and 98.7 percent of waterborne viruses, and requires no electricity or spare parts during its year-long lifetime, powered by sucking alone. It costs about US$4 and has a purification volume of 700l. The product contains a special halogenated resin that kills bacteria and viruses on contact. LifeStraw Family is designed to filter 10,000l of water in the home, enough for 18 months . Based on the same principle as LifeStraw Personal, it works by pouring water into a bucket, from which it flows through a small hose into the LifeStraw filter device, which is fitted with a small tap.

“It is something that may well have very useful applications in an emergency scenario. But it’s not a development tool, it doesn’t really solve the problem of getting water to people. This is a good interim stop-gap in an emergency where there’s plenty of water but it’s contaminated, but it’s not a long-term solution,” - spokesman for the charity WaterAid UK

Programme development officer of WaterAid America - "It is not a sustainable option for poor communities in developing countries to attempt to treat and purify water,”

IMA World Health project chief cautioned “The individual LifeStraws have only a limited role in solving Africa’s drinking water problem. It takes a fair amount of sucking power to use the straws so it is not appropriate for small children,” He also pointed out that LifeStraw was unable to filter out amoebas and giardia, a debilitating intestinal parasite, saying that this limited its usefulness and appeal.

Water of Life

"Despite impressive revenues from oil and diamonds, there has been virtually no investment in basic services since the 1970s, and only a privileged minority of the people living in Luanda have access to running water," said a briefing paper by the international medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières .

More than half the people living in informal settlements, called musseques, depend on private tankers for their daily water in the oil-rich country. More than 300 privately-owned trucks bring water into the city every day . Raw water is pumped from the River Bengo into the waiting tankers, which then go to a chlorination point, where the drivers buy a container of chlorine and pour into the water before leaving the pumping station. MSF found that many trucks were leaving the station without chlorinating the water, to avoid queuing and make as many round trips as possible. But the 2006 cholera outbreak in Angola in which 67,257 cases were recorded and 2,722 people died - the world's highest fatality rate - shook the authorities.

Development Workshop , an anti-poverty non-governmental organisation found that people living in the musseques were paying private sellers up to 10,000 times more for water than those who were better off and living in the part of city with piped water were paying the provincial water company for treated water.

A family of four in the musseques, earning less than $50 a month, could spend as much as $60 on their monthly water needs. According to Cain, "this often does not include the basic minimum required per person per day - you might find families managing with a 20-litre jerry-can per day".

MSF noted in its paper that the cost of water was determined by market forces. "Water prices are ... subject to speculation and can vary, even on a daily basis, depending on access (distance from the water collection point to the distribution point, and the condition of the road that leads to the final distribution point) and demand (availability of water in nearby areas)".

"It is a business worth several million dollars a year," said Dauda Wurie, the Water and Sanitation Project Officer of the UN Children's Agency (UNICEF) in Angola.

Wages of Unbridled Capitalism - comments

There is much in this article that Socialist Banner and its regular readers can agree with .

"...The fact that poverty is a problem cannot be denied. But to condemn it without interrogating related problems and issues is, by all measures, escapist and self-defeatist. A comparative appraisal of poverty and unbridled capitalism the world over attest to the foregoing assertion. Hindsight reveals that the insatiable quest and rush for riches and raw money or the primitive pursuit of and accumulation of riches ordinarily associated with unbridled capitalism lies at the root of the myriad problems facing the world today...

... When capital is solely based on primitive accumulation, especially within an exclusive club at the exclusion of the majority, then it begins to attract prejudices and nuances of varying perspectives. In particular, it begets impunity. The feeling that everything is possible with money begins to assume centrality in public discourse. Money becomes an end in itself. This is particularly so in the so-called Third World countries, where education is anchored in money, and selfish and personal pursuit of happiness, to the detriment or total disregard of the collective good of society...

...Different classes begin to emerge at various levels with attendant considerations as to what a person owns and comes from, and which party they support. As a result, both intra-class and inter-class tensions begin to emerge depending on the prevailing prejudices, belief and nuances; usually with tragic consequences. This is where the curse of primitive capital lies...

...Instead of capital for human development, it becomes capital for human destruction. In the process, fear creeps in and usually it is fear of the unknown. People begin to seek refuge in primitive cocoons and related factors and prejudices emerge, usually tribal, ethnic, class, religion, culture and privileges. Conspiracies begin to emerge ranging from sabotage, elimination of the un-wanted, corruption, discrimination and marginalisation...Consequently capital begins to oil the wheels of injustice...

... Because people must protect themselves, private armies begin to emerge. Capital must therefore be used to procure weapons and related assortment; eventually people must be paid to do dirty work even if it means eliminating others. At times others must either be marginalised or frustrated because of the fear of their abilities or the so-called fear of the unknown. As a result poverty is created where it should not have been, and ironically, it is poverty created by capital. How many understand how capital is creating poverty in Africa?..

...Do we not we see democracy become dictatorship by capital? Whoever pays gets the vote, even if nothing other than making money through corruption and related vices is understood...

...Moreover why do we fail to give our people clean water but are quick to build dispensaries to sell drugs to those suffering and dying from water-borne diseases. What kind of research are our public health officers engaged in? Do we need to re-educate the elite sons and daughters of Africa?Quest for capital or raw money becomes the rule rather than the exception...

... As a result we produce professors and graduates who are no more than salesmen of western products, including raw capital...Imagine having doctors who cannot decipher malaria from headache, or stomach ache from heart-burn! Engineers and quantity surveyors who are concerned about how much money they can make from a given contract as opposed to quality of structures being erected...

... Social imperatives come before capital and not the other way round. Provide clean and drinkable water to all, as opposed to placing it at the behest of private commerce. The trend continues. First it was privatisation of land, apparently not for maximisation of production but increasingly as collateral for destructive capital. Remember vast land is hoarded land and is not under productive utilisation.
Now it is water.
What will be next? Imagine a situation where air is poisoned by vagaries of capital, and therefore human beings are forced to buy so-called treated air...

Where we do find ourselves in disagreement is the authors faith that somehow we can have the good bits of capitalism without the bad bits . The author describes this as "the socialisation of capital" , as if the present system of exploitation can be beneficial if placed in the right pair of caring hands and adapted to tackle the social ills of the world .

"The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side." - William Morris

Indeed, we see little wrong with people campaigning for reforms that bring essential improvements and enhance the quality of their lives, and some reforms do indeed make a difference to the lives of millions and can be viewed as 'successful'. There are examples of this in such fields as education, housing, child employment, work conditions and social security. However, in this regard we also recognise that such 'successes' have in reality done little more than to keep workers and their families in efficient working order and, while it has taken the edge of the problem, it has rarely managed to remove the problem completely.
What we are opposed to is the whole culture of reformism, the idea that capitalism can be made palatable with the right reforms .
In other words, although individual reforms may be worthy of support, the political strategy of reformism—promising to win reforms on the behalf of others—is a roundabout that leads nowhere. Those wanting to improve society should seriously question whether capitalism offers enough scope for achieving lasting solutions to the vast range of social problems to which it gives rise. Of course, some improvements are made and some problems are alleviated. Yet new kinds of problem also arise in a society which is changing ever more rapidly, seeking new ways to make a profit.