South Africa:
Campaign against pre-paid water meters

The "pay as you go" approach has reached into a new market — 
water. Pre-paid water meters are becoming the latest way to 
deprive the poor from access to water in South Africa.

In more and more communities around the world — as "cost 
recovery" or for-profit market based approaches to managing 
public utilities usurp human rights — people are finding they 
must pay up front, even at communal standpipes.

If you have no income you cannot pay and then you have no water.

Pre-paid water meters are now prevalent in South Africa.

Johannesburg Water in partnership with Suez is in effect 
violating one of the most celebrated achievements of South 
Africa's transition to democracy. The South African Constitution 
and the enshrined Bill of Rights provides that, "everyone has the 
right to have access to sufficient water".

South Africa is also a signatory to the International Covenant on 
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This Covenant explicitly 
acknowledges, "water is a public good fundamental for life and 
health — the human right to water is indispensable for leading a 
life of human dignity, it is prerequisite for the realisation of 
other human rights".

The French multinational Suez (through partnership with 
Johannesburg Water) is effectively overlooking both this 
International Covenant and the South African Constitutional right 
of access to sufficient water by installing pre-paid water meter 
systems in poor and primarily black communities of Johannesburg.

Pre-paid water meter systems and the associated policy of "cost 
recovery" has resulted in price increases, hitting poor 
communities the hardest. Unable to pay, poor families have been 
cut-off from their water supplies — as many as ten million 
people have been affected by cut-offs since the end of apartheid. 
Those poor communities without previous access to clean water 
have either suffered the same fate once infrastructure was 
provided or have simply had to make do with sourcing water from 
polluted streams and far-away boreholes.

The collective impact of water privatisation on the majority of 
South Africans has been devastating. The desperate search for any 
available source of water has resulted in cholera outbreaks that 
have claimed the lives of hundreds.

Not long ago, Suez was the company leading the globalisation of 
private water operations, declaring that bringing water to the 
poor is one mission that the company was committed to, yet in 
it's Strategic Action Plan from January 2003 Suez revealed its 
new corporate strategy which essentially is to abandon projects 
which are problematic, risky or not as lucrative — mostly in the 
developing countries.

Pre-paid metering systems have proved disastrous where ever they 
have been introduced.

In Great Britain pre-paid water meters were declared illegal in 
1998 following research that linked them to increased cases of 
dysentery and other diseases related to lack of clean water.

That lesson is already known to South Africans from the 2001 
cholera outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal province, which showed 
conclusively this disaster was linked to policies of increased 
cost recovery, the installation of pre-paid meters, and the 
special vulnerability of people living with HIV or cholera.

Suez and their like are increasingly being exposed for what they 
are — profit thirsty sharks.

In the Philippines, Argentina, India, Canada, the USA and in 
France, Suez has a legacy of problems.

These include early termination of contracts, fines from 
regulatory agencies, unfulfilled contractual agreements, angering 
local communities affected by groundwater impacts and they have 
also faced a number of corruption investigations.

The Water For All campaign is calling for the abolition of pre-
paid water meters and a reversal of the south African 
Government's policy of privatisation.

"Now is the time for governments to publicly affirm the human and 
constitutional right of all South Africans to water by ensuring 
full public ownership, operation and management of public 
utilities in order to provide free basic services for all.

"Now is the time for government to make a firm political and 
fiscal commitment to rollout universally accessible 
infrastructure for the delivery of water that will uphold human 
rights and human dignity", said Water For All.

The Polaris Institute and Water For All are calling for 
international solidarity with Water Struggles in South Africa.