Our right to have enough water

 

The United Nations recently agreed to recognise water as a human right. South Africa’s constitution did so in 1996. What is civil society’s role in protecting and promoting water and sanitation as human rights?

The answer must begin with the sobering reality that normal democracy no longer suffices. Despite 17 years of democracy, popular discontent has become a daily experience.

The ballot box has increasingly given way to police batons and bullets, as people demonstrate both against what is, and, for what ought to be.

I come from that section of civil society that represents the demonstrators so they may be heard. This does not mean we support the way they express their pain but we do fully empathise with their plight.

There is a disquiet that is shared in even greater numbers by those who no longer even expect to be heard – and so don’t take to the streets, or bother to vote.

Civil society’s role in promoting a human rights-based service delivery is, accordingly, that of an organised and reasoned voice that articulates popular anguish. It is the voice of a constructive critic: of the constitution; of the laws that supposedly back our rights; and of the government and municipalities charged with providing water and sanitation services.

In a word, it is from that section of civil society that, from its own perspective, seeks to speak truth to power, in Edward Said’s challenging words.

The constitution’s guarantee to water is brief. Yet it contains two qualifications both of which are problematic. The first is “access”.

A pub illustrates one of the immediate problems. Any one over the age of 18 is free to enter the pub. This is access. Drinking, however, is another matter entirely.

Unrestricted access allows one to smell and see the drinks but to drink requires money.

Moreover with “access” as the only measure, and sticking to this pub metaphor, statistics will record only those people who enter the pub, whether or not they actually drink anything. The narrow focus on “access” would therefore say more about the frequenting of pubs than the nation’s drinking habits.

It is for these reasons that the constitutional guarantee of “access” needs to be changed to “provision”.

The second qualification is that the constitutional guarantee is only to sufficient water. It is silent on the amount of water that is sufficient.

This rather important question has been left to Parliament to determine. Civil Society does not consider 25 litres per person per day to be anything near a sufficiency that meets the Constitution’s guarantees to life, health and dignity.

Cosatu and the South African Water Caucus are among the organs of Civil Society that dismiss the 25 litre standard as derisory. Cosatu wants it doubled; the Water Caucus has still to agree on the amount.

Research by the SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) finds the basic minimum to be 94.5 litres per person per day without counting extra water needs of the very young, the old, the sick – and the vast numbers of unemployed mocked by our Bill of Rights.

This fourfold increase in water is modest when compared to the water demands of, say, golf courses. One golf course uses the same amount of water as would supply nearly 32 000 people 94.5 litres per day.

This, like everything else I mention, is, of course, ultimately a highly political matter. It seems a section of civil society has been fated to raise these thorny points of the politics of priorities.

The Constitutional Court, alas, chose to duck this issue when it rejected the Soweto residents who questioned the meaning of sufficient water. The court, in its additional dismissal of these residents’ attempt to have prepayment water metres declared unlawful, also effectively ruled, to go back to our pub, that having access to the pub was the only legal entitlement.

Moving from water to sanitation, it also falls to civil society to point out that sanitation is not only the step-child of water but of the constitution itself. The constitution somehow managed to forget about sanitation altogether.

Also forgotten in practice – even though it’s an explicit constitutional mandate – is that the socioeconomic provisions of the Bill of Rights are supposed to be “progressively realised”. This provision lies largely stunted and ignored.

Turning to the body of water and sanitation laws and regulations, two additional observations are immediately apposite.

First, putting aside the puzzle of why the government should have embraced neo-liberalism as uncritically as it did and, thereby, at the very best, postponed directly addressing the urgent needs of the majority who had elected it, –all the main water and sanitation legislation reproduces, in many different forms, all the main principles of neo-liberalism. The Bill of Rights’ guarantee on water has thus been heavily contaminated, from this view, by the commercialisation, commodification, corporatisation and related principles shaping water legislation.

Many of the other problems behind the service delivery demonstrations stem from the Water Department’s failure to regulate effectively and it’s even more striking failure to enforce its own regulations.

For instance, the Water Department chose a most bizarre interpretation of its statutory enforcement role for a very long time. It adopted what it called a “developmental” approach, which meant being culpably tolerant of management, regardless of the consequences. Other than pocketing the far from paltry pay, management was not expected to deliver.

The publicity given to cholera and other water-borne diseases compelled the then minister to declare that she would be adopting a zero tolerance policy. This resulted – my second illustration – in years of drafting a National Water Services Regulation Strategy. The proposed strategy astonished by its persisting tolerances.

Samwu submitted two detailed written submissions, the second of which was in May 2008. Samwu still awaits a response. Samwu raised this matter with the then DG, in 2009. She promised a prompt response. But Samwu still waits. Worse still, the strategy has simply disappeared; gone AWOL.

And so we come to the municipalities. Trying desperately to be positive, the best that can be said is that the government has at least now recognised the enormity of the problem. It’s so-called Turn Around Strategy, however, is an egregious example of what Professor Jonathan Jansen calls “symbolic strategy” – a plan for people who, for psychological or political reasons, feel there just must be a plan no matter how unrealisable or vacuous it may be.

One connection between the state of the municipalities – including the “world-class” city that Cape Town chooses to call itself – and neo-liberalism needs to be made explicit. Privatisation, outsourcing, consultants, BEE all come from, and are sustained by, neo-liberalism. All not only corrupt an already under-capacitated management, but also affect staff.

The managerial ethos of the bottom line, rather than service delivery, along with the more general and overlapping ethos of money as the measure of everything, together with municipalities seen as the source of lucrative privatised wealth (have you noted how “lucrative” is invariably the adjective used by the media to describe any public contract outsourced to the private sector?) – all this means that acceptance of a distinct public sector ethos is for idiots only.

Forgetting that public sector workers are also human beings does not invite any special commitment from the service workers, regardless of constitutional guarantees. Human rights pay the heavy price of this double whammy.

Human rights pay an additional price for the very high political priority given to the meeting of targets. Massaging statistics to meet this imperative is but one of the reasons for the unreliability of the water and sanitation claims that find their way into official data.

These often exaggerated statistics help politicians and government officials; but this very assistance is a disservice to human rights because it sweetens the realities that give rise to the epidemic of service delivery protests.

Finally, let me praise the Department of Water Affairs. From my experience, the department consults more than any other. They are almost unique in this respect.

Alas, however, they differ hardly a jot from even the worst of the departments when it comes to acting on their information. It is being greedy to expect the department to agree with all of what a critical voice says to them. But there is little, if any, evidence that they act on anything we say.

So, even without the awful Protection of Information Bill, we, who see ourselves as the voice of the voiceless, end up feeling voiceless.

l Rudin is a member of the South African Water Caucus. This is an edited version of a paper he delivered on the role of civil society at a recent human rights symposium on “Access to Water and Sanitation Services”, hosted by The Department of Water Affairs.

http://www.themercury.co.za/our-right-to-have-enough-water-1.1096711

SA mine warned to comply with national water act

The Deputy Ministers of Water and Environmental Affairs, Ms Rejoice Mabudafhasi, MP, and the Deputy Minister of Defence and Military Veterans, Mr Thabang Makwetla, MP, today issued a stern warning to Shanduka Coal Mines in Middleburg, Mpumalanga, to comply with government regulations on environment and the National Water Act or face the music.
The warning came after the two deputy ministers visited the mine plants this morning and found that the operation of its two subsidiaries violated the basic rules of environment and they did not have a water use license. It was also discovered that the two plants polluted a main road that passes through them by littering coal dust on the road.
At a meeting with Shanduka management the deputy ministers also warned the mine owners against operating their plants without a proper hazardous waste management policy which they said could lead to a hazardous health risk to the nearby community. The hazardous waste from the coal could also lead to the destruction of a forest which is next to the mine plants.
“We are concerned that your mine violates the basic environmental laws of this country. We are also worried that you continue with your operations without a water use license. It is arrogant of you to want to deviate a busy provincial road that is used by the public for the sake of your profits,” the deputy ministers told mine management.
The deputy ministers were also concerned about Shanduka operating their two plants across the busy R555 Road which leads from N4 into Middleburg town. Sometimes traffic along this road came to a halt to allow the mine trucks to ferry coal across the road. The deputy ministers asked the mine management to construct its private road that would allow its trucks to operate without interfering with the public road.
However, the Chief Operations Officer of the Shanduka Mine, Mr Zirk Van der Bank, assured the deputy ministers that his company would do its best to comply with government requirements for operating the mine.

 

http://www.dwa.gov.za/Communications/PressReleases/2011/ShandukaMinesmediarelease.pdf

Moon has more water than previously thought in challenge to view of origin

The moon has more water than scientists once thought, casting doubt on theories of its creation, according to a study.
Scientists measured seven samples of magma trapped as “melt inclusions,” within crystals, according to a paper in the journal Science. The water content of the lunar magma was 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested.

Lower quantities of water and volatile compounds on the moon, when compared with the Earth and other inner planets of the solar system, have long been taken as evidence the moon formed during a giant impact that had enough energy to create seas of magma, according to the Carnegie Institution’s Erik Hauri, the study’s lead author. Today’s finding challenges that view, he said.

“If our samples are representative of the entire moon, this is basically the best way to calculate how much water’s on the moon,” Hauri said. “And what are the chances that the first seven samples look like Earth?”

The findings suggest that the impact from a Mars-sized body that formed the moon was either much hotter or much cooler than previously thought. If the moon impact was cooler, then some material including water wasn’t molten and was locked in the lunar interior.
If there was more energy, then the rocks boiled and created a temporary atmosphere, Hauri said. While the atmosphere would have been dense and short-lived, it might have allowed the still-forming Earth and moon to exchange water.

“The presence of water tells you how much potential it has to sustain life,” Hauri said.