Commodification, water infrastructure, and methodologies for counting water losses in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article takes up the story of a numerical indicator of system water losses called Non-Revenue Water (NRW), which is becoming an important measure for benchmarking South African Water Service Authorities (WSAs). The aim of this paper is, in the first place, to document the adoption of NRW as a Performance Indicator (PI), showing how it reflects a shift in the domestic regulatory framework in South Africa and the assumed priorities of water managers in line with the dominant governmental rationality in the sector. However, in drawing this discussion towards the theme of commodification I also show that the NRW audit enables a new way of seeing and speaking about “public water,” while the story of its uptake tells us a something about the development of contemporary governmental norms, and the forms of the resistance that shape it. On the one hand then, the article links the enthusiasm for NRW auditing in South Africa to a wider movement in the development and usage of audits and indicators as technologies of government at a distance. On the other hand, and stepping to a higher level of abstraction, I argue that the uptake of NRW must be read in relation to a contested set of processes marked by struggles over the commodification of water, and which sometimes turns up in the numbers.

KEYWORDS:

• Non Revenue Water
• neoliberalism
• audit culture
• water losses
• commodification

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Prishani Naidoo, Gillian Hardt, Eric Worby, and my colleagues in the Department of Political Studies for commenting on drafts of this article. I am also grateful for the support and encouragement I received from Antina von Schnitzler. Finally, thanks to the Graduate Programme in International Affairs at the New School in New York, as well as the staff and patrons of The Double Down Saloon, for giving me a base during my sabbatical to finalise this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Polanyi a lot of this turns on the status of land, labour and money as “fictitious commodities” – that is social goods that are inherently problematic to commodify, in part because they are not produced for sale on the market. It is, in particular, the commodification of these (which includes water as part of land and nature) that creates the deleterious consequences of marketisation. I do not think this takes us far enough. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to clarify this point, for me, what makes something’s commodification likely to be resisted is the ways in which it becomes an essential need for modern forms of life in particular locations. For instance, we can imagine a situation in which access to bandwidth becomes so important to people’s ways of life, that its commodification will be challenged (something that is arguably already happening).

2. By commodification I mean the process through which the circulation and allocation of a social good is made subject to market forces and, is in this sense, bound to marketisation. For a more focused discussion of the union of Polanyi and Foucault, and more specifically the idea of a “double movement” between neoliberal governmentality and the resistance of the poor, see my PhD The South African Diagram (2014; see also Veriava 2019b). In relation to the specific theme of water auditing this line of argument is developed in the practical context of Soweto in my article “Non Revenue Water, Non revenue Life: The making and Mitigating of Water losses in Soweto” (Veriava 2019a). Finally, these themes are theoretically explored in the third article of this series, “Beyond Disciplinary Commodification: Water Security and the Poor in South Africa” (forthcoming).

3. By the politics of the governed I mean the practices that belong to a domain of political experience that opens up in relation to modern governmentality, and through which subaltern subjects contest and shape the frameworks within which they are governed. The pairing of a study of municipal water management with questions of “the politics of the governed” enables a discussion focused on technical-political practices that underlie the deepening commodification of water, and the ways they are shaped and even transformed by the resistance of governed subjects. To be clear, such resistance takes on multiple forms, from individual acts of sabotage of hacking of infrastructure, to organised political action. For a similarly focused analysis, but more grounded account of “the politics of the governed,” see Dubbeld (2017) (see also Veriava 2019b, 2014).

4. The forms of “legibility” that I am trying to highlight in this article are, however, different from the kinds of “political-legibility” of the infrastructure that Robins shows was provoked by the recent Cape Town water crisis (2019). For one, the NRW balance elaborated a technical indicator that remained technical, and for the most part has remained beyond direct public-political contestation (see also Veriava 2019a). The kind of “legibility” I have in mind then is one that is enabled by a specific kind of technical knowledge and mode of representation of the circulation of water within the built infrastructure.

5. Unaccounted For Water is sometime also abbreviated as UAW.

6. For a more comprehensive discussion of Operation Gcin’amanzi, the installation of prepaid water metres and the the management of water losses see Veriava (2019a).

7. Two possible exceptions are in the work of Harvey (2007) and Von Schnitzler (2016), both of whom noticed that, before the introduction of household metering, there was no way of knowing what the different components of the losses were based on JWs formula for UFW. My point, however, is that neither JW’s calculations of losses nor the indicator itself became a subject of public political critique or sustained academic attention.

8. The problem set that characterised Soweto’s pre-Operation Gcin’amanzi infrastructure and its management were not, however, unique to Soweto, and it reflects the more a common set of challenges of addressing water losses in many apartheid-era-built townships.

9. By way of illustration, where the 2012 study found NRW to be 36.8%, using the same data set McKenzie, Siqalaba, and Wegelin (2012) found that UFW was 30%.

10. UFW = Bulk impute – authorised use (billed and unbilled); NRW = Bulk impute – billed amount.

11. In some NRW balances this third category is counted as part of commercial losses.

12. I am not suggesting that this was the only reason for the shift to providing free basic water. As I discuss elsewhere, other factors included the challenges of managing cholera (Veriava 2014), as well as institutional unevenness in the capacity to establish indigent managements frameworks (Veriava 2014, 2019b) that could target allocations. However, all of this must be read both in relation to the forms of community resistance that were already emerging in the 1990s (including within congress-aligned movements), and more generally, widespread resistance to payment for services in poor communities (see also Bond 2004; Ruiters 2007).

13. As discussed in a separate paper, this way of counting consumption (authorised use) in townships was articulated with an apartheid governmentality focused on the mass delivery of only the most basic levels of service.

14. The SABS CoP remains bound to the generic formula of UFW, but it puts emphasis on rigorous standards of measurement. A key problem then is how to conduct audits of systems characterised by unmetered consumption, as is the case in many townships and informal settlements. A section is therefore devoted to measuring and quantifying authorised use in unmetered contexts and it suggests methodologies which include the usage of mini bulk metres and night flow studies to quantifying usage and the likelihood of losses (SABS 1999, 65).

15. “Germany: “UAW is the difference between the quantity of water entering a system and the sum of water billed, including the water which is measured but for some reason not paid for.”

Hong Kong: “UAW is the unrecorded consumption represented by the total raw water input into a system less the recorded consumption in domestic, commercial and industrial supplies to consumers as measured by consumer metres, and other known quantities of free supplies and system losses such as wash water in treatment works.”

Malaysia and Philippines prefer the term “non-revenue water” (NRW) to UAW.

Japan and Brazil prefer the term “effectively used water” (Vallier and Broadhurst 1997, 7).

16. My reconstruction of the South African story of NRW goes in a different direction from Anand’s account of the Indian experience, where he details a dispute between World Bank consultants and Indian engineers over methodologies to calculate losses (2015). In his account, the World bank, using the NRW formula showed high losses in a particular section of the system, prompting the engineers who managed it – motivated by how it portrayed them and who also feared (not wrongly) that the numbers would be used to push for new privatisation schemes – to challenge the World Bank’s numbers, leading to a compromise in how losses were represented.

17. UFW was estimated by JW to be around 40% in the early 2000s when operations in Soweto began (Smith 2006).

Additional information

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Ahmed Veriava

Ahmed Veriava is a researcher and writer who works as a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.