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SOUTH AFRICA:
STRUGGLING TO PROVIDE SAFE DRINKING WATER TO THE
POOR
NELSPRUIT: EXPANDING
THE WATER NETWORK
The city of Nelspruit is a 3-hour drive east of
Johannesburg on the Mozambique border. Old Nelspruit
is white and prosperous and serviced by a water
network. But when Nelpsruit expanded post-apartheid
to include the surrounding townships, it inherited
240,000 people without water and basic sanitation.
In 1999, the municipality needed
$38 million to expand the water and sewage network.
The local government hoped that contracting out water
delivery to a private company would help alleviate
the burden of that cost. The Greater Nelspruit Utility
Company (GNUC), a consortium led by a British water
company, Biwater, was granted a 30-year concession
to manage and expand the water and sanitation network.
Martin Nizsse,
local manager of the private utility: There’s
definitely a water shortage. And that’s a
global problem. And I think with the water shortage,
you have to manage it properly. And the market mechanism
is normally a way of managing these shortages to
provide people a good service.
PAYING FOR CLEAN
DRINKING WATER
GNUC has laid 90 km of new water pipelines and 17
km of new sewage pipelines. They have installed
7240 new water meters and made 5000 new water connections.
Company managers expected to earn back the money
spent on these expansions through increased water
tariffs. However, what they encountered was a poor
and defiant population that can’t and won’t
pay its water bills.
Henry Nkuna was a freedom fighter
who now fights the water company.
Henry Nkuna: First thing,
we are unemployed, most of us. And if you are expecting
a person who is unemployed who survives with a loaf
of bread with 6 children, how do you expect that
person to pay for water?
Local manager Martin Nizsse hadn’t
anticipated the problem.
Martin Nizsse:
We have installed and improved the services. And
we expected the people in that area to pay, because
if they continued to pay, more money was made available
to pay off the loans for this investment. Unfortunately,
that didn’t happen at the speed we thought.
Actually, it fell flat on its face.
Anita Khoza is a refugee from Mozambique
whose only source of income is selling homemade beer.
She gets water from a neighbourhood water tap kilometres
away. The water’s free, but the service is erratic.
Soon, she’ll be connected to the privately-run
water network. Clean and reliable water costs money,
money she doesn’t have.
Linden MacIntyre:
What will you do when they make
you pay for water?
Anita Khoza: It’s
going to be difficult, yes, because I’m even
struggling to get food for my children. I really
don’t know …
In the township where Khoza lives,
Kanyamazane, only 20% of water customers are paying
their bills.
PRIVATE WATER
BAILOUT
The Greater Nelspruit Utility Company says it can
no longer afford to fulfill its obligations under
the contract because of a “culture of non-payment.”
In order to save the concession, GNUC has demanded
that the municipal government forgive lease payments,
increase subsidies and agree to a million-rand rescue
package.
The company has resorted to a drastic
measure to encourage people to pay their water bills
– repossessing their homes.
Anna Xaba faces eviction if she doesn’t pay
thousands of rand in water bills. Not only is she
not paying for water now, she never has in her entire
life.
Anna Xaba:
I don’t have that kind of money and there
is no way I can get that kind of money. From the
time I was born I haven’t bought water. We
used to get water everywhere to drink. I can’t
understand why these people are selling water to
us. Do they make the water?
Martin Nizsse is unsympathetic.
Martin Nizsse:
I think the real message for
these people is that they shouldn’t let it
come so far that they go so far in arrears. They
have to learn that they have to save water to make
sure that there is water available for everyone
and that the water they use, they can afford that.
Patrick Bond is a political economist
at the University of Witwatersand in Johannesburg.
Patrick Bond:
You can attribute most of the
non payment to people's inability to pay. Not a
lack of desire to pay as is often claimed. African,
black people have lost nineteen percent of their
income since 1994. The government statistics show
white's have increased their income by fifteen percent.
People are just too poor to pay.
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