The Sunday News
Qhubani Moyo
PROPOSALS for installation of prepaid water meters have seen lots of advocacy by civil society in opposition to the issue.
In areas like Bulawayo civil society organisations went a gear up and even took their advocacy to the streets and door to door campaigns urging residents to reject in totality the proposals. Most urban areas have been faced by acute water shortages which in some areas such as in Harare have persisted for a number of years.
The Government has had difficulties in fiscal transfers to subsidise council owing to limited fiscal space and economic hardships mainly induced by sanctions but accelerated by corruption in most local authorities.
In the case of Bulawayo where major demonstrations and door to door campaigns have taken place, the city council has made it clear that prepaid water meters are to be installed in the pilot phase in the City Centre and the Cowdray Park area commonly known as Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle. This is the area where Government allocated residents stands post the Murambatsvina era and the area had not been well serviced to ensure proper provision of water services by the council.
This has seen a situation where the residents are getting water from communal taps and council has not been able to levy them appropriately for their usage. In a bid to address this problematic situation council has proposed that as a short term measure the residents should be levied through introduction of prepaid meters so that even when they draw water from the communal taps there is some form of payment to the council.
In the long run, having accummulated much money the council can then move in to rectify and normalise the provision of water at individual household level. I see this as very noble, a commendable stance by the council and will urge them to move with speed and not only instal prepaid water meters in Cowdray Park but the rest of the city to ensure that the city council is able to collect adequate revenue to provide quality and clean water to all residents. Civil society demonstrations as an expression of disgruntlement on Government policies are common the world over but they should not be taken too far to warrant stopping of the implementation of the very policies that would help the citizens themselves.
However, I wish to address the Bulawayo issue within the broader national debate on water provision and the importance of prepaid water meters in ensuring efficiency in provision of the same. At the heart of civil society advocacy are two major issues, the first being that in terms of the country’s constitution water is defined as a right and as such all citizens should be entitled to access it. The second part of their argument is that the economic situation in the country is very harsh and as such it would be difficult for many people to sustain a prepaid water system.
The campaign run under the theme, Water is a Human Right, has created a lot of excitement among the civil society players as it is one of the few events which they have held outside political advocacy. In the past key civil society organisations in Bulawayo, most which are remote controlled by the former Minister of Parastatals, Dr Gorden Moyo, have been used as political surrogates of the MDC-T.
Fortunately, the split of the MDC-T has seen most of the organisations that worked as the commissariat of the MDC-T drift with the movement of their political godfather Dr Moyo who moved base to align with the Holland/Biti led MDC Renewal.
His move has seen a number of these organisations undergoing some form of political cleansing and thus allowed them to deal with real issues of advocacy on service delivery. While this has put them at logger heads with the MDC-T-led council thinking that they are actually going to continue with a political role like they have done before, the organisations have chosen to deal with soft but important issues of service delivery. In the process they have won hearts of a considerable number of citizens and are thus hoping for a gradual drift towards universal acceptance in the communities. It is hoped by many residents that this new trajectory and definition of the role of civil society is here to stay and it’s not just a new ploy and approach to use emotional issues like water to get people behind them and then deliver them to the new political home of their godfather.
It is my intention to interrogate the issues raised by civil society on the merits of their presentations. First and foremost, I would like to play the devil’s advocate and declare from the very onset that I am of the view that the installation of prepaid water meters is not just important for all local councils but extremely urgent if the service delivery issues are to be solved. The compelling reasons for this will follow. But before that I would like to engage on the first, of water being a human rights issue.
While this is not disputable, it is disingenuous for the civil society organisations to project an impression that rights like water provision can just be supplied without taking into consideration economic costs.
The truth of the matter is that the city council has been ridden in debt due to payment failure by the residents. The inability to pay, has been blamed on economic hardships yet in reality most of it is due to irresponsible citizenry. Some residents just would not pay their bills unless some pressure has been put on them. In fact, most will recall that in the current setup where there are fixed water meters, most residents will only resort to payments after disconnection. The disconnections usually carry a fine but many will prefer that situation as they are prepared to pay an extra amount as fine.
The council books are obviously not in good standing owing to a number of factors but key among them is failure of payment by residents. Their situation was made even more difficult by the Government directive to zero down all amounts owed by the residents in August 2013. This was compounded by the stop in support by international organisations who were providing chemicals to the council.
For the council to function properly to deliver safe, clean water to your homestead it needs resources to do so. There are basically two sources of income, the first one being the Government fiscal transfers to local authorities which is not happening now because of the problems faced by the Government. Government fiscal space has continued to shrink so it has not been able to assist significantly in fiscal transfers to local authorities. The second source of revenue is collection that it makes from residents. This is the revenue paid by the residents for the services rendered to them by local authorities. However, the councils have been faced with major challenges as residents have not been responsible enough to make payments for what they consume. For instance, the president of Local Urban Councils Association who is also the mayor of Bulawayo indicated that council is owed about $90 million by defaulting residents. This is over and above the $50 million that was written off for non payments accrued between 2009-2013. Compounded with this have been the legal challenges that the councils face after a High Court challenge by Harare lawyer Farai Mushoriwa who challenged the disconnection of water to his home and won. Council has since appealed against the order but still faces challenges in effecting disconnections as they face uncertainty on what could be the outcome of the case in the Supreme Court. The order by the High court itself while not totally outlawing disconnections makes the situation very difficult for them because it says that council should seek court orders first before they make the disconnections. This process is very cumbersome as it involves legal processes and high expenses which ultimately will become an additional financial burden to the consumers themselves.
The only option at hand that the residents should respect is to pay for their services. The easiest way to ensure that the residents pay for the services is to make pre-payments.
Minister of Water Environment and Climate Cde Saviour Kasukuwere has been on record urging all local authorities to generate enough revenue to finance the delivery of safe, clean and quality water to the residents. He also urged the residents to pay for the services rendered to them. Cde Kasukuwere indicated that pre-paid water meters were the only practical way of achieving this goal and that Government was not going back on the proposals. This view was corroborated by the Minister of Local Government, Public works and National Housing Dr Ignatius Chombo during the Wold Bank-supported Water and Sanitation Service Level benchmarking peer review held Mutare on 19 September 2014.
Residents Associations see it differently with both the director of Harare Residents Trust Precious Shumba and co-ordinator of Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association Rodrick Fayayo who is on record describing the push for prepaid water meters as a total hijacking of a human right by city bureaucrats who are only concerned with increasing revenue inflows instead of addressing what he termed the challenges associated with the billing system that has given residents a nightmare.
The civil society campaigns have described the proposals as a violation of Section 77 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe. Section 77 (a) of the country’s constitution pronounces that “every person has a right to safe clean and portable water”.
It also urges the State to make reasonable legislative and other measures, within the limits of the resources available to it, to achieve the progressive realisation of these rights.
This in the layman’s language indicates that the right to water is not absolute as civil society would like the citizens to believe. The section should be read first with an understanding that this cannot be done immediately but progressively, meaning bit by bit as time goes on and conditions allowing. This is why there is a caveat that Government should ensure realisation of these rights within the confines of the resources that it has. This should be read with Section 86 of the Constitution which speaks of limitations of these rights and thus making it clear that they are not absolute.
Further to that, our Constitution does not specify these rights as derogatable rights which mean that the State is not necessarily compelled to enforce them if it is outside its means. It is a way of helping the State against unnecessary and frivolous litigation and at the same time dealing with the culture of free entitlement that can crop up among the citizenry. Arguments that the system of prepaid water meters failed in other countries like South Africa are understandable but should be used as a way of improving our own approaches so that we don’t fail. They should not be used as a deterrent measure but a best practice of what not to do and how to do better. After all we are in different environments and what applies in the other countries would be different because of the differences in policy implementation approach.
What should be understood is that residents make payments for the price of water. The current setup where the residents pay after use has created problems for the councils and the residents must pay in advance so that the council is able to deliver the services to them.
This takes me to the second part of their advocacy that the residents will be unable to pay because of hard economic conditions. This argument is not persuasive given that the citizens do not have free entitlement to services. If they do not pay for their water and services who do they expect to pay for the service and how do they expect the councils to efficiently deliver those services?
How would one expect to be entitled to water when they don’t want to pay for the purification and delivery? Already as stated in my opening arguments the residents have taken advantage of the pay after use scheme and abused it by not paying to an extent of a cumulative debt of $90 milllion in a year for Bulawayo alone. How do people expect the local authorities to function with such a huge budget deficit?
If residents are able to pay for other services like electricity and airtime in advance why should they be militant against payment for water in advance? If indeed as I agree with them water is life then it means that in their everyday planning and even within the economic hardships they will prioritise water as a vital pillar of their everyday existence. Councils have, however, indicated that they have contingencies for some free allocation of water to each household a day. This means that no one will totally go thirsty should they be in a very difficult situation. Also there are supplementary water sources in urban areas like boreholes which can come in handy to assist very critical cases.
Infact, advocacy for the civil society can be more productive if it is directed at harnessing donor funding for tangible emergency water reserves intervention measures like increasing the number of boreholes in urban areas. In the meantime, the council should move with speed to implement without hesitation the prepaid water meters for the benefit of the residents. Government’s role is to implement policy decisions which are helpful to citizens even when and in most cases they may not be seeing the immediate advantages.
It is my conclusion that once implemented and operational the residents will rejoice on the beauty of the prepaid water meters to provision of water to the citizenry. The civil society in their advocacy should not mislead residents. Prepaid water meters are the only practical way of ensuring sustainable provision of safe, quality and clean water to the people.
Dr Qhubani Moyo is a policy and political analyst from Bulawayo East Constituency. He is contactable on [email protected]
