SOUTH AFRICA: Resistance to privatisation continues

April 23, 2003
Issue 

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.
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