I just knew, notwithstanding no spare time at all this week, that I'd get drawn in here. A masters student of mine runs the SA low-income sanitation programme, and just filed a terribly terribly depressing thesis. But with the state failing dismally, nevertheless, there's terrific eco-labour-social movement organising around H20 issues in SA right now...
Here are some Jo'burg contributions to your witty dialogue:
* at one level, the debate over how many litres to flush boils down to the issue of "skid marks"--i.e., whether low-income folk mind a dirty bowl because they're only getting 6 litres, instead of we white petit-bourgeois types who insist upon the standard-Euro 12 litres per flush (you will all recall the Larry Summers December 1991 memo which posits that Africa is 'vastly underpolluted' in part because people here don't mind the aesthetic distractions caused by pollution, compared say to rich folk in Beverly Hills--but he's never asked an African woman, I'd warrant a bet, and doesn't factor in the gender bias in household labour power, particularly when we're not talking just individual toilets but often shared facilities amongst several families... but then again an African woman's marginal productivity of labour is not 1/1000th as high as a Beverly Hills movie star, so why bother asking, eh);
* the debate then runs into cost-benefit analysis of whether for very low-income people (20% of my town, who earn $100/month/household or less), a flush of any kind is individually/socially affordable--the ghastly World Bank mission that parachuted into SA in November 1994 for a fortnight to design infrastructure policy said, simply, No, don't give those folk a loo, make them poo in a pit latrine;
* our reply (as I documented in the March 2000 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism) is a complicated effort to show that benefits flowing from public health, gender equity, environmental protection, desegregation and even economic multipliers from building/maintaining good infrastructure outweigh the costs, and of course we can win such an ecological-modernisation argument in theory, but in practice it's really a matter of political power, which only this week we seem to have gained sufficiently to force Thabo Mbeki to announce--at a Cosatu congress, and in the wake of his appalling denial of antiretrovirals as he questions the HIV-AIDS link--a new policy of 6 kl of water per month per `poor' household free (which is halfway to the labour/social movement demand for 50 l/c/day free);
* but then, Their Team says, even if a bit of free water is provided, don't use it to flush, because a Ventilated Improved Pitlatrine (no joke: VIP) is just as dignified and hygienic as an indoor flusher;
* and then we point out that because it's dark inside (it has to be, so the mosquitos fly up to a little vent atop a long pipe through the roof, carried by the warm air, and perish on a little mesh screen), wee ones will be frightened, so that if you go to poor areas where VIPs are installed you see a little ring of tiny excrement around the VIP entrance, where kids have run out fearful of being inside alone (hey, I am too);
* that doesn't impress the neolibs, so then they start installing them all over Jo'burg, with our dolomitic rock and undermined land (thanks to gold mining) and high water table, and so what we're looking at, very soon, is a repeat of a 1991 incident just north of Pretoria where massive dense pitlatrine construction caused rapid E.coli transmission into boreholes which in turn catalysed a cholera epidemic that killed more than 100 people, not to mention unreported but just as deadly diarrhoea outbreaks;
* but, Their Team insists, Jo'burg is too poor to install good quality infrastructure and to redistribute sufficent water, so privatisers (esp. French water corps like Lyonnais des Eaux) are required to invest in new grid expansion, and if they have to provide lifeline water sufficient to flush, the incentive to service low-income areas will diminish markedly, and hence for the Igoli 2002 privatisation programme (Igoli is Zulu for City of Gold), densepacked pitlatrines in black shack-settlements built upon poor-quality soils is the best we can hope for: There Is No Alternative;
* local critics have renamed the Igoli 2002 scheme `E.coli 2002' (there's a similar longer-range official plan, Igoli 2010, which they call Ebola 2010), and a dramatic upsurge of resistance of resistance this year will culminate tomorrow at an AntiPrivatisation Forum, which will draw together the best lefties in the union movement (the municipal workers just elected a revolutionary to be their gen.sec. last month) and communities (the famous Trevor Ngwane) and greens and churches and universities across Jo'burg (there's a website link to the Forum, at http://www.aidc.org.za );
* some of you will complain that a town like Jo'burg--built a century ago for one purpose: to extract gold from the ground so it can be shipped out to Fort Knox to be put back under the ground--which has no water, shouldn't have everyone flushing... yes, we agree (see the 3/00 CNS) and we'd go further to say that this town should simply not exist, and certainly should stop raiding Lesotho for its water (through a disastrous WB-designed dam, which is currently Africa's largest public works project), but the first priority is to stop my neighbours from watering their huge english gardens and filling their pools and taking long full baths (my own 1934 tub, I admit, is more than 2 metres long), so that all our megalopolis' 9 million residents have at the very least that 50 lcd...
* class apartheid is being constructed via World Bank-promoted infrastructure, housing and transport arrangements, and what used to be a colour-line distinguishing one neighbourhood from another is now the sewage line...
(I do quite a bit more along these lines in a new book, `Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal,' available from Africa World Press at http://www.africanworld.com )
Cheers, comrades! Patrick Bond (pbond at wn.apc.org) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa phone: (2711) 614-8088 work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa work email: bond.p at pdm.wits.ac.za work phone: (2711) 717-3917 work fax: (2711) 484-2729 cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548