Privatisation: South Africa

In this blog we will shift our focus further south of the continent, delving into the ongoing issue of water privatization; a phenomenon that has swept Africa, encouraging corruption, unsustainability, and widespread water scarcity. 

 

Water privatization is where private sector organizations buy or exploit water utilities, limiting its availability for public sector use. This is often implemented to battle municipal financial issues, as well as aging systems within communities. (FWW, 2022). 

 

Generally, across Africa water privatization has caused irregular supply or shortages of water for nations suffering from water insecurity, for example, Cameroon Water Utilities (CWU) was a private water company that had bought a 10-year contract with Camerounaise des eaux another water company. Similarly, Senegal has experienced water shortages too, despite it being managed by a large international water company ‘Suez’, a company also operating in Gabon (Root, 2021). In 2005, its daughter company ‘Veolia’ was managing what was found to be contaminated water containing typhoid. This followed a previous controversy on the company where it was discovered that there were bill irregularities and environmental threats from the infrastructure. 

 

South Africa’s privatization initiative 

Figure 1: Diagram illustrating South Africa's approach (Source)

South Africa has particularly had many impacts from water privatisation, aided from political corruption and the inequality gap between the people. In 1996, following the South African government attempted to shift their water governance into a more ‘Macro-economic approach’. To do this they began by decreasing grants and subsidies to towns and councils, forcing local governments 

to rely on privatization and commercialization to produce a turnover in sales for basic services like water and utilities. The impacts of this movement caused massive inflation in the prices of water, typically ‘59% more than public sector water’ (FWW, 2022) as an average global scale. However, In South Africa, the rate inflated from R10,60 per month in 1993, to R60 per month (600%) in 1996 after the neo-liberal government policy of privatization. This heavily affected poorer communities in the country, including Fort Beaufort (Eastern Cape Town) and Queenstown, where the rate was a 150% increase. In a nutshell, what was thought to be a promising way of tackling municipalization turned out to be a huge living cost crisis that exacerbated the gap and inequality between the rich and poor communities in South Africa. This devastating effect resulted in outbreaks of cholera, particularly in the more deprived areas, as people were forced to find other sources of water from contaminated wells and lakes. In the year 2000, the Kwa-Zulu Natal province had more than 120,000 people infected with cholera as a direct result of the abolishment of communal tap water (McKinley, 2018).

Figure 2: Graffiti by privatization activists in South Africa (Source)

Solutions and Active resistance

As a result of these hindering repercussions of water privatization for the general public, the local people hit back with active resistance. Smaller, more deprived towns initiated a new social movement named the ‘Anti-Privatisation Forum’ (APF), situated in urban areas including Pretoria and Johannesburg. This group, formed in the year 2000, aimed to encourage poorer communities to stand up for their right to water, spreading awareness of the ongoing plea to make water more accessible for everyone. They wanted locals to see water more as a ‘necessity’ rather than a ‘luxury’ (Root, 2021). This sense of empowerment was spread further through legal actions and schooling, inspiring organizations on a national scale including NGOs, in hopes of more robust action from the government.

Taking a step back, some of the wider scale solutions to water privatization has been the Public-Public partnerships and The Water Act, organizations that work to make water accessible to the public, re-municipalization of safer and cheaper water (McKinley, 2018). Politically, these are easier to implement in more economically stable countries, so African nations may not benefit the most from this type of resolution.