Patrick Bond, Durban
The ruling African National Congress will win the vast majority of seats in the March 1 elections for South Africa's city, town and district councils, given the lack of left electoral opposition. An ANC vow that half of its new councillors will be women is quite an astonishing show of progress — but only if we ignore the actions of these politicians.
Last time around, in 2000, the ANC promised free "basic" water, electricity and other municipal services. This should have been a great success, combining patronage with good public policy. It wasn't.
South Africa has been rocked by unending social strife over appalling township and shack settlement services. In Durban, official data shows that poor people are actually paying far more for their water, and cutting down consumption, notwithstanding health risks.
There are an average of 16 protests in South Africa each day, minister of safety and security Charles Nqakula conceded in parliament last October. Of protests recorded in 2004-05, 13% were deemed "illegal", with 66 police injured. No public records exist of protesters' injuries and fatalities. However in Durban, the name Marcel King — a teenager fatally shot in the face by municipal security contractors when he came to his mother's aid during an electricity disconnection in 2004 — resonates as a next-generation Hector Peterson (the first young person killed by police during the June 16, 1976, uprising in Soweto).
Activist networks have arisen in major cities since 2000 — such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg, the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town and Abahlali base Mjondolo shack-dwellers' movement of Durban — and continue to express grievances. But far beyond traditional left strongholds, revolts have increased in intensity and frequency since 1997, when the first round of high-profile community protests over the failure to deliver municipal services began in Johannesburg's El Dorado Park.
'Ominous signal'
In what the December 25 New York Times described in a full-page article as "an ominous signal to this nation's leaders, sprawling shantytowns have begun to erupt, sometimes violently, in protest over the government's inability to deliver the better life that the end of apartheid seemed to herald a dozen years ago".
For example, Durban's impoverished Foreman Road shack settlement has a single water tap and four padlocked, scrap-wood toilets serving more than 1000 households. Nearby Kennedy Road has six broken toilets serving 6000 people.
According to the NYT, "Residents say Obed Mlaba, the mayor, promised during his last election campaign to erect new homes on the slum site and on vacant land opposite their hillside. Instead, however, the city proposed to move the slum residents to rural land far off Durban's outskirts. In an interview that he cut short, a clearly nettled Mlaba argued that the protest was the work of agitators bent on embarrassing him before local elections."
Perhaps the highest-profile agitator has been Trevor Ngwane of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee. Once head of the ANC's regional Soweto branch and a Johannesburg city councillor, Ngwane was fired by the party in September 1999 because he wrote a newspaper column against looming commercialisation of municipal water. Not long after, his council colleagues flew to Buenos Aires on a fact-finding tour of the world's most famous water outsourcing project. The company that financed the trip, Paris-based Suez, was soon chosen to become Johannesburg's water manager, in the single largest municipal supply contract in Africa. A 20,000-strong protest in late 1999 didn't dissuade the ANC's neoliberal bloc from proceeding.
In Durban, even without adopting formal privatisation, ANC mayor Mlaba and city manager Mike Sutcliffe are denying shack dwellers water and sanitation — as well as their civic rights. Sutcliffe banned Abahlali base Mjondolo from peacefully marching into town on November 14, and the police arrested and injured dozens when several thousand gathered at Foreman Road to defy the ban. The activists responded with the "Campaign for the Human Dignity of Shack Dwellers", and vowed, "No house, no vote!" in the coming election. They are fed up with uplifting but ultimately broken promises.
Broken promises
The ANC's 1994 Reconstruction and Development Program offered, "in the medium term, to provide an on-site supply of 50-60 litres per capita per day of clean water". (For a household of six, that amounts to nearly 11 kilolitres a month as the minimum free lifeline supply.) In 1996, the South African constitution confirmed, in the Bill of Rights, that "everyone has the right to have access to ... sufficient water".
As citizen alienation worsened, in 2000 a new promise was broadcast far and wide: "ANC-led local government will provide all residents with a free basic amount of water, electricity and other municipal services, so as to help the poor. Those who use more than the basic amounts will pay for the extra they use."
This year, the ANC local elections manifesto has more promises: "No community will still be using the bucket system for sanitation by 2007. All communities will have access to clean water and decent sanitation by 2010. All houses will have access to electricity by 2012. There is universal provision of free basic services."
Durban pioneered a free six kilolitres per household per month scheme in the late 1990s, and then-water minister Ronnie Kasrils announced six years ago that the whole country would change water pricing to include this free lifeline.
Unfortunately, if a metered consumer uses, say, 6001 litres in a given month, municipalities may charge that consumer for 6001 litres — not one litre. Hence the original rationale for free basic water becomes a direct refutation of its spirit.
In this and other ways, municipal officials set out to sabotage the ANC's 2000 campaign promise. A recent MBA thesis at the University of KwaZulu-Natal by Reg Bailey (who administers Durban's municipal tariffs) reviewed the impact of water price changes from 1997-2003, as free basic water was implemented. Bailey showed that the doubling in price of water from two rands a kilolitre to R4 during those seven years for metered customers adversely affected poor people most.
For the poorest third of those whose bills could be monitored, consumption dropped from 22 kilolitres a month to 15 kilolitres a month, a stunning decline of nearly 33%. This is deeply worrying, since water is so crucial to good hygiene, especially during the ongoing AIDS pandemic and periodic cholera and diarrhoea outbreaks. These water cutbacks are also particularly onerous for women within households.
(As the price of Durban water doubled, the middle-income group of households cut back only from 24 kilolitres a month to 22 kilolitres a month, and the wealthiest third of metered households — many with swimming pools and English gardens — dropped from 35 kilolitres a month to 33 kilolitres a month.)
Johannesburg's record is similar. Rich residents barely noticed the increased water price. During the late 1990s, those using a small amount suffered a 39% increase in water bills, while the highest-volume users were charged only 24% more. Then in mid-2001, Johannesburg officials transformed a relatively slow-rising tariff curve inherited from apartheid into an extremely "convex" curve, which soars quickly and then levels off, so hedonistic users have little incentive to conserve.
The effect for low-income households was that after consuming the inadequate six kilolitres a month free allowance, often by large families with several backyard tenants, water bills jumped sharply. For many, this left the overall cost higher than before the free basic water promise.
Supported by the Freedom of Expression Institute, a national campaign lobby against water privatisation is taking Johannesburg Water to court next month, arguing that residents' constitutional rights are being violated. They also argue against pre-paid water meters, and request that the Suez contract be terminated.
Protesters vilified
The ANC government has reacted in the erratic manner we've come to expect. Protesters are periodically vilified as a "third force" — a conspiracy of shadowy "counterrevolutionaries" or "ultraleftists".
For housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu, the cause lies elsewhere: "If there are protests, then it is possible we are not communicating properly."
The person in charge of state communications, Joel Netshitenzhe, wrote in the Sunday Times just prior to the April 2004 presidential election, that "rigour in research does matter: ten million people [were] connected to water which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be compared with the few households occasionally cut off."
A "few"? The chief water bureaucrat at the time, Mike Muller, acknowledged two months later that according to a 2003 national survey, "275 000 of all households attributed interruptions to cut-offs for non-payment", meaning roughly 1.5 million people lost their home water access that year.
In short, a central reason behind the growing community dissent is, in a word, "micro-neoliberalism": the application of the market as far into the terrain of human rights as people will permit.
At election time, the harsh taste of being poor in South Africa is obscured by sweet words. But the upsurge of activism reminds us that from the death of racial apartheid rose another problem: the birth of class apartheid, even down to the drops of water we need simply to live.
[Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society ( From Green Left Weekly, February 8, 2006.
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