Tokenistic water and neoliberal sanitation in post-apartheid Durban

ABSTRACT

Within the international water sector, Durban's municipal practitioners have been widely celebrated, for innovations in retail pricing, new product development, creative service delivery and community participation. However, in a society as divided as South Africa, with a high degree of neoliberal public policy influence from international sources, the myriad social, economic and environmental contradictions have reached deep into Durban's water and sanitation politics. Distant parts of the city were neglected when it came to ‘uneconomic' water and sewage pipe extension. Tokenistic supplies of water were given to poor people, but in a manner that left them with one-third lower consumption levels. In surveys, the no-flush toilets were overwhelmingly rejected by hundreds of thousands of recipients. It is in the destruction of older water and sanitation policies, and the creation of new ones for poor and working-class black Durban residents, that adds new meaning to critical analysis of ‘roll back' and ‘roll-in’ neoliberalisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Durban
• roll-back neoliberalism
• roll-in neoliberalism
• sanitation
• urine diversion
• water

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Patrick Bond is professor at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town. Since earning his doctorate (1993, Johns Hopkins, under the supervision of David Harvey), he has taught at the Universities of Witwatersrand and KwaZulu-Natal, where he directed the Centre for Civil Society. There, social activists educated him about the contentious disputes in the city's water and sanitation policy.

ORCID

Patrick Bond http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6657-7898

Notes

1 According to the report, the University of KwaZulu-Natal Pollution Research Group is supported in this cutting-edge work not only by the municipality, but also the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, South Africa’s Water Research Commission, the German and Dutch cities of Bremen and Delft, and some of the world’s leading universities: Caltech, Duke, ETH Zürich, Asian Institute of Technology, Cranfield, Swansea, Imperial College London and others.

2 In another study, 2008 comparative retail water price data were analysed by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions and Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (2008), and only Msunduzi (Pietermaritzburg) charged urban South Africans a higher price for a typical low-income consumption level of 12 kl/hh/month at full pressure: R50 (Msunduzi was R55). (At semi-pressure water level, the price was R35.) In contrast, Cape Town’s price was only R10 for 12 kl/hh/month.

3 Reflecting how little this seemed to matter, however, Macleod testified in a 2007 affidavit to the Johannesburg High Court about the UNDP’s analysis of Durban’s rising block tariff without apparent acknowledgement of the very high relative price increases in the key consumption range (6-20 kl/hh/month) as a problem. Instead, the increases within the context of a rising block tariff were “an important part of the legislative framework for acting on the right to water” (Macleod 2007, 11, emphasis added) in spite of the evidence provided by Bailey and Buckley (2005) that the price elasticity was so high that low-income residents had cut back their consumption dramatically.

4 What this policy adjustment entailed, technically, was the refilling of the 200 L drums, previously once each day and subsequently 1.5 times a day, and then moving from installing a ground tank drum to a yard tap with a ‘flow limiter’ (Gounden et al. 2013). Various explanations can be given for this laudable increase in Free Water, including the embarrassing findings of Bailey’s research; a national ‘Water Dialogues’ multi-stakeholder process (in which Macleod was a central participant) that more clearly spelt out rationales for increasing water to low-income households (Galvin 2009); and a Focus Groups strategy that taught Macleod more about consumer grievances (Wilson, Malakoana, and Gounden 2008). Bottom-up articulations of grievances, including protests at City Hall over inadequate water and sanitation as well as the rise of localised service delivery protests (Bond 2010b, 2011) may also have affected municipal water policy. These in turn may, as Nash (2013) predicted, have contributed to cooptation of civic groups, when gains are not followed up with far-reaching ‘non-reformist reforms’ (Bond 2012).

5 During this period, Macleod was a board director of Johannesburg Water.

6 There is a substantial difference between the UD device chosen in Durban (without water and with maintenance/cleaning responsibility completely devolved to the household) and UN Habitat’s recommended low-cost sanitation system. The latter has various advantages over the UD system, and has witnessed more than a million installations in India: “The twin-pit system uses 1.5-2 litres of water per use in a flush toilet that is connected to two pits that allows recharging of the soil and composting, and a close-loop public toilet system attached to a bio-gas digester” (Reddy 2007).