SOUTH AFRICA: Resistance to privatisation continues

BY
PATRICK BOND

The rift between the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and the
Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) over privatisation has
deepened substantially since January, when Pretoria launched the full sale
of the state-owned telephone company, Telkom, under the rubric of “black
economic empowerment”. But will it be a sufficiently robust conflict to
tear apart the bandages that were carefully applied to the ANC-COSATU-SACP
(Communist Party) Alliance at the ANC's annual conference in December?

While COSATU won a minor victory in January, when some railway privatisations
were halted by transport minister Dullah Omar, President Thabo Mbeki's
government remains cemented to its privatisation agenda — euphemistically
called the “restructuring of state enterprises”.

Mbeki has labelled trade union and community opponents of privatisation
and for-profit services delivery as “ultra-leftists”. Within the ANC-led
alliance, Mbeki has combined intimidation with divide-and-rule tactics
to maintain the pretence of unity. It has not been an easy job. At protests,
union placards cry: “We did not fight for liberation only to sell it to
the highest bidder!”

In October, a partially successful two-day national strike — involving
approximately 25% of the work force highlighted how far the relations between
COSATU's ranks and the government have deteriorated. It was not the first
expression of dissent. A two-day strike badly marred the August 2001 World
Conference Against Racism. Then last August, the World Summit on Sustainable
Development featured a march of 20,000 radical community, environmental
and anti-corporate activists — which COSATU conspicuously avoided — who
attacked the “privatisation of the WSSD”, including the crucial water and
energy sectors.

Access to water and electricity has become a key struggle in South African
townships. One study conducted by the union/community-aligned Municipal
Services Project, alongside a government research agency, found that an
estimated 10 million people have suffered water cutoffs and electricity
disconnections. Most were cut off because they could not afford to pay.

As a result, a cholera epidemic continues, with more than 140,000 cases
since August 2000. Millions of people — especially young African children
— contract diarrhoea each year because they cannot afford purified water
and sanitation is atrocious. Tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases
are rampant because, without electricity, women are forced to cook and
heat with coal or wood. These terrible conditions are a key factor in HIV+
people — there are now 6 million in South Africa — moving rapidly into
full-blown AIDS.

Privatisation of water or electricity cannot occur in more than a few
pilot projects without movement towards “full cost-recovery”, a process
termed “corporatisation”. According to virtually all advice from neoliberal
agencies like USAID and the World Bank, achieving cost recovery and removing
“inefficient” cross-subsidies — whereby those who use a great deal of electricity
or water pay a higher per-unit cost (as township and union activists demand)
— is vital to attracting foreign investment in South Africa's utilities.

The main international water companies which have taken the plunge —
Suez, Vivendi, Biwater and Saur — have already shown a propensity to deny
water services to low-income communities — and to fire workers in droves
— in several pilot projects in Johannesburg, Nelspruit, and smaller cities
in KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces. As the national electricity
company, Eskom, prepares for a 30% public sale this year, it too has clamped
down on customers who are in arrears. This led to 20,000 Soweto households
being disconnected every month during 2001, until resistance from militant
communities rolled back the process in 2002 and 2003.

Indeed, with COSATU again campaigning against Telkom's privatisation,
there appears to be renewed scope for an anti-neoliberal “small-a” alliance
of the dispossessed to emerge from concrete struggles. South African Municipal
Workers Union members sometimes dispense with traditional ANC loyalties
to join members of Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) in the major cities,
even while the latter are tentatively preparing for a future political
party challenge to the ANC government.

Most importantly, the APF and militant community activists continue
taking matters into their own hands. As regularly documented on the Indymedia
web site(<http://southafrica.indymedia.org>)
and in the excellent book We are the Poors by Ashwin Desai (Monthly
Review Press), these struggles involve illegal reconnections of electricity
and water. Community activists even resort to removing small “trickler”
systems in municipal water pipes because these permit only a tiny flow
of about 25 litres per person per day for a family of eight.

Community and union demands for 50 litres per person per day of free
water and cross-subsidisation by the hedonistic well-off suburban users
have so far been ignored by all municipalities and the national water minister,
Ronnie Kasrils. Kasrils — like the minister in charge of the overall privatisation
program Jeff Radebe — is a leader of the SACP and claims to be opposed
to water disconnections.

After the cholera outbreak in 2000, the ANC did agree to provide a free,
small “lifeline” water supply to every household. However, activists report
that municipal and national bureaucrats continue to sabotage the promise.

The newest campaign is against the remaining sale of Telkom. Telkom
shares were offered initially to black investors through a scheme called
“Khulisa”, but then broadened (after a white trade union complained) to
all South Africans. This will require even more nuance by both state privatisers
and their critics. Telkom's delivery statistics since “liberation” in 1994
are shocking.

COSATU has noted that since its partial privatisation and full commercialisation,
Telkom has escalated tariffs for services used by poor households while
slashing them for those aimed at rich families and businesses, especially
for international calls and the internet. Telkom's last tariff hike imposed
a 13% increase on the majority of low-income families, while the high-income
group only had to pay around 6% more.

Poor people cannot afford to maintain phone lines. As a result, Telkom
has cut off 80% of the new landlines it rolled out in the past five years.
At the same time, Telkom has cut employment by a third, and most recently
cut back on investment.

“The Khulisa offering is just an attempt to side-track our people from
the reality that privatisation can only worsen conditions for the majority
of our people. The reality of the Telkom [share offer]... is that property
is being expropriated from 46 million South Africans to be auctioned off
to, at best, 1 million “investors” in the name of black economic empowerment”,
COSATU states.

Anti-privatisation activists have threatened to disrupt further governments
attempts to privatise by not only resorting to illegal connections of services
but also targeting the merchant banks, foreign firms and international
agencies which are promoting privatisation.

[Patrick Bond teaches at Wits University in Johannesburg. He is author
of Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest
(Merlin Press, London).]

From Green Left Weekly, April 23, 2003.

Visit the Green Left Weekly
home page.

From GLW issue 535