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Water & Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa

by Patrick Bond

Welcome to Johannesburg, whose retained name commemorates Johannes Rissik, the 19th century surveyor of the stolen land. One day, the name will surely be changed, just as must the inherited landscape of apartheid-era and post-apartheid urban, suburban and peri-urban "development."

The eco-social contradictions in this, the largest industrial complex in Africa, and especially at the World Summit on Sustainable Development conference in the ultra-bourgeois suburb of Sandton, are unmistakable. Tens of thousands of delegates arriving at Africa's main commercial complex in late August will have descended to the Highveld by breaking through a thick brown cloud of particulates which comprise a smog comparable to that of Los Angeles. Temperature inversions and the cold dry season--it won't have rained for the past four months--are the natural reasons Johannesburg's 1500 meter elevation and brisk winds still don't provide clean air in winter.

More importantly, the last 115 years of white settler conquest of nature is grotesque in this region. Viewed from the air, smudges of human fingerprints are everywhere to partake: concentrated industrial pollution over the east-west factory strip and the Johannesburg power plant astride the airport; gold-mine dumps to the south of the city which perpetually blow sand and dust into black neighbourhoods; periodic bush fires; and the ongoing use of coal and fuelwood for cooking and heating in impoverished townships like Soweto and Alexandra.

It would be wrong to blame the victims: low-income black people. Across the country, electricity privatisation has led to supply cut-offs for more than a million households who cannot afford price increases for the cleaner form of energy. From the air, be thankful that you do not experience the most dangerous results, such as the re-emergence of tuberculosis and other rampant respiratory infections that threaten the lives of South Africa's five million HIV+ people.

Just before landing, you are, however, close enough to notice the silvery glinting of thousands of tiny metal-roofed shacks in the bright sun, like cauterised wounds on the yellowish skin of a wintry Africa. The township slums stretch to the horizon, and house nearly half of the ten million inhabitants of Gauteng Province, in which Johannesburg, Pretoria and the Vaal Triangle iron and steel complex are located. Because of a stingy government policy based on World Bank advice in mid-1994, shortly after Nelson Mandela was elected president, the post-apartheid squatter camps and meagre new formal residential areas for low-income black residents are actually further away from job opportunities and are worse served with community amenities, schools and clinics, than even apartheid-era ghettoes.

Looking down, your eyes are soon drawn away to the bright green of well-watered english gardens and thick alien trees that shade traditionally-white--now slightly desegregated--suburbs, permeated by ubiquitous sky-blue swimming pools. To achieve the striking effect, the most hedonistic louts of Johannesburg abuse water. Waste occurs not only in the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois residential zones sprawling away from the city centre, but in the southern mining belt and the corporate-dominated farms on the city's outskirts. Further scarce water is used for cooling coal-burning electricity generators. The country's pro-business bureaucrats brag about supplying the world's cheapest energy for industrial use, because they fail to price in the damage to the environment, including the world's worst global greenhouse gas emissions corrected for population size and income. The root cause is a phenomenon economists call "Dutch Disease"--to commemorate the rise of North Sea oil prices which raised the value of the currency and hence decapitated Holland's manufacturing sector. Mineral wealth distorts and distends the local economy and annuls efforts at industrial balance. Why the emphasis on mining? Gold was discovered here in 1886, immediately drawing thousands of fortune hunters and proletarians. Johannesburg soon became the planet's largest metropolis with no substantial natural water source. Sixty kms to the south, the Vaal River is pumped uphill to Johannesburg, but by the 1980s it became apparent that the source would be insufficient for the next century's industries and suburbanites.

Apartheid-era engineers and World Bank project officers responded to potential shortages with a massive dam and tunnel scheme that draws water several hundred kilometers from across a mountain range atop the small and perpetually impoverished nation of Lesotho. The country should logically have been merged into South Africa in 1994 but self-interested politics intervened on all fronts. Instead, the state continues to reproduce itself on the back, mainly, of donor aid.

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project was meant to add $50 million to annual revenues, through sales of water to Gauteng consumers. Africa's largest infrastructure project, costing an estimated $8 billion if all six dams are built, the project is now less than half finished but has already displaced tens of thousands of Basotho peasants, inundated sacred land, threatened endangered species and endangered the Orange River's downstream ecosystem.

Who pays the bills? Johannesburg water prices went up by 35% during the late 1990s, but township residents in the lowest consumption tier found themselves paying 55% more because of the cost of the Lesotho dams, which the old Botha regime needed surreptitious funding for during the mid-1980s due to apartheid-era financial sanctions. The World Bank set up a secret London account to facilitate matters, overriding objections from the liberation movement, including its then representative in Ireland, Kader Asmal.

As South Africa's water minister from 1994-99, Asmal was chosen to chair the 1998-2000 World Commission on Dams. Entangled in the massive contradictions and hypocrisies, he refused to let the Commission study the Lesotho dam and angrily rejected grassroots demands--from Alexandra, Soweto and Lesotho--that overconsumptive water users in the mines, factories and mansions be made more responsible for paying the dam's bills and for conserving water so as to prevent future dam construction. Such "demand-side management" would also have included repair of perpetual leaks in the apartheid-era township infrastructure, where half of Soweto's water is lost.

Bankers were anxious to continue financing, and construction companies ready to keep building the multi-billion dollar dams. The World Bank's Inspection Panel refused a full investigation of township residents' complaints in 1998. The Bank also went to great lengths to protect a corrupt senior official in the project, Masupha Sole, from being fired, in spite of documented bribes to his Swiss bank account by a dozen of the world's largest construction companies over a decade's time (1988-98). Not only did the Bank refuse to bar the companies from further contracts, but it withdrew promised financial support for their public prosection in Lesotho.

Then in 2001, Asmal's replacement as water minister, Ronnie Kasrils, announced a halt to further dam construction once the second Lesotho mega-dam is completed in 2004. Yet no environmentalist or community activist trusts Kasrils' instincts, in the wake of his simultaneous rejection of the Dam Commission report and his trip to China's ultra-destructive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which he endorsed, inexplicably.

As is true across the world, Johannesburg's worsening environmental mess is mainly due to the logic of capital accumulation, at a time of rampant environmental deregulation associated with the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio. South Africa's traditionally racist and pollution-intensive companies have been embraced by a grateful black elite, including sleazy politicians and the neoliberal officials who control many arms of the government. To be sure, the onset of free-market economic policies based on an export-orientation fetish preceded Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) government by a few years. But a small clique of "New Guard" ANC officials today work closely with the leftover "Old Guard" bureaucrats whose commitment to racial apartheid is conveniently forgotten but who prosper just as nicely while building class apartheid.

Together, the ruling party and its new-found Afrikaner co-conspirators have:

• allowed the vast bulk of rich white people's loot to escape through relaxing already porous exchange controls;
  
• let the largest firms relocate their financial headquarters to London, hence sucking out profit and dividend flows forever;
  
• cut corporate tax rates from 48% in 1994 to 30% five years later in search of new investment that never materialised;
  
• watched aimlessly as business fired a fifth of all formal-sector workers;
  
• pushed industries like clothing, footwear and appliances to the brink of collapse under international competition;
  
• incessantly privatised once-formidable public assets;
  
• provided pollution permits to some of the world's most irresponsible companies, such as the infamous Iscor iron and steel polluters of Vaal River water; and now
  
• begun planning to dump vast taxpayer funds into bizarre projects like "Blue IQ"--to make smart Johannesburgers smarter and leave the rest behind--and the "Gautrain" rail system linking the airport to Sandton, central Johannesburg and Pretoria for what are unselfconsciously termed "elite" passengers.

The ANC's "Igoli 2002" plan to privatise or commercialise most of Johannesburg's public services, drafted alongside World Bank consultants, was renamed by critics "E.coli 2002" for a reason worth reviewing. Excrement from Gauteng's slums has been penetrating the porous soils because nearly four million people must use pit latrines at best, and the veld at worst.

The French water privatiser Suez was the beneficiary of the world's largest water commercialisation contract, but has done virtually nothing to provide sanitation in Johannesburg's informal settlements. The result is that even opulent Sandton's borehole water water supplies were despoiled, leading to a public outcry and emergency filtration system improvements by households, schools and offices in February 2001.

At exactly the same time, cholera devastated the rural population of KwaZulu-Natal and inexorably spread to Alexandra, killing four residents. The Johannesburg bureaucrats responded much as they had during apartheid, with internationally televised forced removals of long-time Alexandra residents to the inhospitable distant climes of Diepsloot.

The same official mentality was evident in April 2002, when non-violent demonstrators marched to mayor Amos Masondo's house, protesting against evictions and the cut-offs of water and electricity due to unaffordability. Masondo's bodyguard responded by pumping eight rounds of live ammo into the crowd, wounding two. Emblematically for the South African "justice" system, 87 Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee members (including elderly people and minors) were arrested and jailed for ten days before getting a bail hearing, while the bodyguard remained at large.

The Johannesburg landscape is also being defaced by other greed-driven processes, including a bank "redlining" (denial of loan access) policy that began around 1990 in many townships and inner-city sites of racial desegregation such as cosmopolitan but poverty-stricken Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville. The logic is that prices are declining, and hence so too are collateral values for the banks. By not making credit available, the banks can declare their prophesy correct, though it is really self-fulfilling and, were the state serious instead of obsequious, reversable.

But with credit unavailable to serious property investors, or even to individual tenants who would potentially convert their inner-city rentals to ownership if given the chance, the result was a mid-1990s influx of slum landlords, many of whom had gained their initial capital accumulation in the mafia-ridden kombi taxi sector. That sector stagnated by the early 1990s, so the investors shifted their liquid resources into huge inner-city blocks of flats in Johannesburg and other cities, buying them at a song once white capital and people had fled, and then denying the buildings even basic maintenance, so as to milk a few more rand from desperate tenants.

Ignoring by-laws, Johannesburg city officials looked the other way, literally. Until May 2002, the bureaucrats simply allowed the systematic destruction of the 1930s-60s inner-city residential units because their attention was glued to the Newtown arts district. There, they yet again hoped, gentrification might take off, notwithstanding the problem that one necessary ingredient, wealthy white patrons and matrons, remain simply too fearful of downtown

Johannesburg to patronise even the famous Market Theatre. One reason is ongoing "crime and grime," in spite of a new camera surveillance system that Foucault would have admired. During the

1990s, the old Central Business District (CBD) was virtually emptied of professionals, with more than two-thirds of office space vacant at one point and Africa's largest prestige building--the Carlton Centre--sold in 2000 at 5% of its 1974 construction costs.

Where, then, aside from London and "EsCapeTown," did smart money flee? Fifteen kilometers northeast of the old CBD, the edge-city of Sandton attracted many billions of rands worth of 1990s commercial property investment, as well as world-class traffic jams, nouveau-riche conspicuous consumption and discordant postmodern architecture. Only the world's most least socially conscious financial speculators would trash their ex-headquarters downtown to build a new city while draining South Africa of capital. Only the most aesthetically-barren rich would build their little Tuscanies on Africa's beautiful Highveld, behind three-meter high walls adorned with barbed wire to keep out the criminals.

The environmental destruction, malgovernance, political repression, social hypocrisy and parasitical financial activity together attract a backlash, of course. What was by all accounts the world's most impressive urban social movement, the South African "civics," was systematically demobilised by the ruling party during the mid-1990s.

From the ashes, an independent network of community groups arose in several Johannesburg townships, and join in coalition as the Anti-Privatisation Forum. Municipal workers and other public sector unions often demonstrate against grievances. Mass marches of workers and residents are increasingly common, and surgical theft of electricity and water by community activists is an everyday occurrence that would make Robin Hood proud.

But virtue at the grassroots turns sour when NGO and trade union politics dominate. The 2001-02 fragmentation of the various WSSD hosting committees--the UN Civil Society Secretariat and South African Civil Society Forum set up by pro-government trade union and church leaders, versus independent-left social movements—symbolises why power relations remain so skewed. Still, elite Johannesburg's repeated attacks on both ecology and the poor will inevitably lead to a "Social Forum" process, which the annual international meeting in Porto Alegre portends for many sites of anti-neoliberal struggle across the globe.

Like the corporate-controlled WSSD itself, Johannesburg will continue to self-delegitimise the very idea of "sustainable development"--until the grassroots, shopfloor, women, youth, church and environmental comrades get their acts together and take power away from those old and new rulers who have made such a mess of Africa's wealthiest city.

But to do this, they will need to sharpen their ideology, and link ocal problems to global phenomena. From that standpoint, and that virtually alone, progressives in Johannesburg welcome the opportunity to use the WSSD as a space to point out the filth created by the local elite. In the same spirit, they remain anxious to unite with others across the world who are thoroughly sceptical that Sandton's privatised Earth Summit will do anything much beyond leaving yet another muddy eco-social footprint for future generations to rehabilitate, simultaneous to the huge repairs we will need to make to a once-beautiful African Highveld.

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