[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Blast from the past: Suez bragged of discriminatory policies

[Patrick Bond]

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-02-03.asp

Johannesburg Struggles to Supply Water and Sanitation

By Alexandru R. Savulescu

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, September 2, 2002 (ENS) - As in many cities 
in the developing world, access to water is not an issue in 
Johannesburg. Distribution is.

One hundred percent of the 3.5 million people living in the Greater 
Johannesburg metropolis have access to drinking water, according to 
Pierre-Etienne Segre, CEO of the Johannesburg Water Management Company 
(Jowam).

tower
Water tower in Johannesburg on a street lined with jacaranda trees in 
bloom (Photo courtesy City of Johannesburg)
Jowam is a joint-venture company consisting of Northumbrian Water Group, 
Ondeo, of France, and Water and Sanitation Services South Africa - all 
three of which are part of the France based Suez Group.

There is no problem of water supply in Johannesburg, as good quality 
water is provided by Rand Water in sufficient quantity. But there is a 
problem of distribution. It is the problem of sharing between rich and 
poor areas.

For historical reasons, the rich areas, such as Sandton where the World 
Summit on Sustainable Development is meeting, and where one-third of 
Johannesburg residents live, have full access to high quality water 
services.

The poor areas, such as the Orange Farm in the south, or Alexandra in 
the east, where the other two-thirds of the people live, have access to 
only limited water services. Sometimes cisterns are filled just once a 
day, and they are not centrally located but are placed at the area borders.

march
Marchers in Sandton on Saturday (Photo courtesy City of Johannesburg)
On Saturday, some 30,000 marchers took to the streets of Alexandra and 
Sandton to demonstrate their need for water and sanitation. People 
facing water and electricity cut-offs, evictions, and landlessness 
marched to say that the civil society's Global Forum and the official 
United Nations summit are both a sham in that the very people they 
brought together to discuss sustainable development are implementing the 
destructive policies themselves.

"Our task is to bridge the water divide," says Segre.

On the water services front, Johannesburg Water is replacing illegal 
yard standpipe connections with prepaid meters, ensuring for all 
township residents access to a monthly allocation of 6,000 litres (1,585 
gallons) of free water.

The lifeline service of free water to those who consume less than six 
kilolitres per month is part of a national government water strategy, 
prompted in part by the outbreak of cholera in KwaZulu-Natal. The 
epidemic in 2001 began when a small local authority began charging for 
tap water that had previously been free. Local residents who could not 
afford the 50 rand (US$5) per month charge for electricity began using 
local streams for both water supplies and sewage disposal.

Water experts estimate that most poor people use less than six 
kilolitres per month. In Johannesburg, the lifeline will cost the city 
80 million rand (US$8 million) per year.

But water comes at an increasingly high price. On July 1, Rand Water 
imposed an increase of nine percent in the price at which it supplies 
purified water to municipalities. The increase in the cost of purified 
tap water from Rand Water affects every municipality in Gauteng, 
including the Metropolitan councils of Johannesburg, Tshwane and 
Emfuleni. These municipalities set the retail price of water to consumers.

Rand Water Chief Executive Simo Lushaba said, �It is inevitable that the 
cost of water will increase because it is a scarce resource." He urged 
Johannesburg residents in all areas to conserve water.

An even more challenging task for Jowam is providing adequate 
sanitation. Sanitation, provided to 100 percent of the residents in rich 
areas, is an exception in poor areas. On average, only 50 percent of the 
population has access to sanitation, says Segre.

Johannesburg Water is now working to install ventilated pit latrines, 
also called VIPs, in poor neighborhoods. The VIPs provide a more 
hygienic and safe alternative to existing chemical toilets.

However, providing flushing water toilets to townships also calls for 
cleaning the used water. Due to the lack of any primary sewage network, 
this is only possible through new sewage works, says Segre. These are 
community based alternative sewer systems that function on the same 
principle as the conventional water borne system.

The project makes use of local labor during the construction phase to 
help alleviate an unemployment rate in the townships that can be as high 
as 60 percent, says Segre. It also establishes a community information 
sharing system to empower residents on how the new system works, and how 
to repair minor problems should they occur.

boy
Boy in Soweto, a poor area that is part of metropolitan Johannesburg 
(Photo credit unknown)
This may not be the perfect solution, but it is a step towards it, says 
Segre. "My concern is to identify what is possible to do today, and it's 
not the proper thing to discuss, to debate on that, because people are 
very poor, and they need an immediate solution. My objective is not to 
deliver the best solution today, because the best solution is not a 
reacheable objective. We need to identify intermediary steps."

"It was actually the same in Europe," he said, "but it took probably 100 
years or 200 years for Europe to do that. Here, in South Africa I think 
it is possible to do it in 10 or 12 years."

Poverty may be not as poignant in Europe as it is in South Africa, but 
access to sanitation is still lacking in certain parts of Europe as well.

In Romania, for example, a former Communist country from the 
southeastern part of the continent, while access to water is not a 
problem, more than 10 percent of urban households, and the vast majority 
of rural households do not yet have access to sanitation.

{Alexandru R. Savulescu is an environmental journalist who makes his 
home in Bucharest, Romania.}