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.

"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.

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