A Human Right You Have To Pay For

The United Nations General Assembly in July 2010, passed a binding resolution on the human right to water and sanitation – but for Africa, the human right to water may be far from reality. 1.1 billion, Africa’s 300 million people have no access to safe drinking water, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

While many countries appear to have met the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, rights activists say that African countries which have taken to installing prepaid water meters have rendered a blow to many poor people, making it hard for them to access water. Prepaid water meters work in such a way that if a person cannot pay in advance, he or she will be unable to access water. In non-African countries like the United Kingdom, prepaid water meters are no longer being used after they were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons. They were also abandoned in South Africa at one stage following a massive cholera outbreak, but were reintroduced and have replaced previously free communal standpipes in rural townships.

“The goal to ensure that everyone has access to clean water here in Africa faces a drawback as a number of African countries have resorted to using prepaid water meters, which certainly bar the poor from accessing the precious liquid,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development, a Zimbabwean democracy lobby group, told IPS. Many civil society organisations are against the idea of prepaid water meters.

“If one has to pay upfront before accessing water, then it would mean those in most need would be denied access,” explained Terry Mutsvanga from Zimbabwe. “We already have hundreds of millions of people without access to clean water, and imagine the severity of the water challenge if water prepaid meters would reach everyone on the continent,” Mutsvanga said.

Over the years, prepaid water meters have been widely used in African countries like Namibia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Tanzania, as well as South Africa, where the meters which were rolled out in 1999 are currently in low-income areas. Zimbabwe is currently conducting a pilot project aimed at installing the prepaid water meters, in towns and cities to begin with.

“Local authorities are pressing ahead with the idea of prepaid water meters, but jobless people like me have no money to make prepayments for water while we already have unpaid water bills running into thousands of dollars, which local authorities say they will deduct through all future water prepayments, meaning we run into the danger of having dry water taps for as long as we owe local authorities,” 51-year old Tinago Chikasha explained.

Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users.

Melusi Khumalo in South Africa blame capitalist tendencies for necessitating the advent of prepaid water meters. “Prepaid water meters are a result of such negative policies by institutions like the World Bank and they [prepaid water meters] deny water access to those in most need,” Khumalo, who is affiliated to Parktown North Residents’ Association in Johannesburg said.

In Zimbabwe, Mfundo Mlilo, chief executive officer of Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA), told IPS: “We are vehemently against the prepaid meter project because it will not solve the problems of water delivery, and these prepaid water meters will not lead to residents receiving adequate safe and clean water, while the same prepaid water meters will also not lead to increase in revenue flows as the City of Harare claims.” 300 000 households in the Zimbabwean capital are scheduled to have prepaid water meters installed, while all new housing projects will be obliged to install meters.

While prepaid water meters are set to rake in big money for some of Africa’s local authorities, there are those like Nathan Jamela, an urban dweller in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, who fear the health consequences. “We experienced the worst cholera outbreak in 2008, and we fear that if prepaid water meters are installed in every household here we will slide back to the crisis, with many people unable to afford to pay for water,” Jamela said. 

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 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.

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.