The Politics of Water in Africa

Since water infrastructure is expensive, securing capital investment for these sorts of projects is challenging. This is essentially where the problem lies.

For this reason, Chitonge says, a suitable funding model for the extension of water infrastructure has to form part of the long-term planning in all cities. During the late s and early s, the problem of funding for water infrastructure upgrades in many African cities seemed to be momentarily solved with very keen participation by the private sector and the establishment of public—private partnerships. By the end of the s, a lot of these companies discovered they had over-estimated their returns on investment and a large-scale pull-out from the private sector followed.

Chitonge says there are two major reasons for this.

Discussions on international environment and development issues.

First, the profit projections were over-cooked by the private sector to begin with. Second, as a basic requirement, water is a highly sensitive commodity with a lot of politics surrounding it. Nobody would make noise if the price of shoes went up. Not able to generate satisfactory profits from water provision, the private sector players sought more lucrative options elsewhere. In South Africa, there is still some private sector involvement, but these companies are mostly working behind the scenes — buying bulk water from the national government and reselling to municipalities at an agreed rate.

One does not have to look very far to understand just how complex provisioning water to an ever-growing city can be.

Currently in the midst of an unprecedented water crisis, Cape Town is proving to be a fascinating case study. Although a major drought may be the catalyst, there is a perennial problem that relates to the imbalance between infrastructure and population. People only realise its importance when there is a crisis. Most Capetonians have embraced a more water-wise lifestyle out of necessity, but Chitonge believes that this sort of drastic reduction in consumption could be the key to future global water security.

Chitonge says that policy-makers have the responsibility of passing a message on to citizens that water is a finite resource and that we could all live with less.

Bad decisions

His research interests include agrarian political economy, hydro-politics, and alternative strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction in Africa. Please view the republishing articles page for more information.

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Establishing a funding model Since water infrastructure is expensive, securing capital investment for these sorts of projects is challenging. Africa has been a laboratory for IWRM in the post-Cold War world where neoliberal discourses began to reign supreme in the water sector due to influences of the World Bank and IMF that sought to privatise water services and introduce cost recovery mechanisms.

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While this largely took place in the domestic sector, the studies in this special issue show how the introduction of pricing systems and permits allowed wealthy and powerful water users to take advantage of users without permits. In many parts of southern Africa, IWRM has stifled the water development agenda by shifting focus to the allocation of what was supposed to be a finite scarce resource, when in countries such as Uganda and Tanzania this was far from the case. The focus on management tended to lose sight of the need to enlarge access to water for poor people for a range of productive purposes.

Instead, much attention was directed to creating new, complex institutional arrangements that largely lacked accountability and legitimacy, were prone to elite capture and tended to centralise the power and control of the state and powerful users and the IWRM industry over water resources.

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Our studies have also shown that neoliberal trends such as water pricing and the associated introduction of permit systems have led to a bias in favour of large-scale users who require relatively large amounts of water and have the ability and the networks to apply and pay for the appropriate permits. Such acquisition of large quantities of water raises the issue of whether or not such actions real or potential align with the broader social and anti-poverty goals that are prioritised in southern Africa.

It is interesting to note that there are signs of IWRM fatigue in Europe, where dominant discourses largely focus on water and climate change, water security and the nexus between water, food and energy. It is unclear whether these emerging buzzwords will usher in whole new sets of approaches and paradigms that will eventually replace the current hegemony of IWRM as an idea in southern Africa. What are the implications for deeper issues of development and democracy?



We hope that this special issue can aid further investigation and study of how concepts evolve and mutate and are absorbed as well as their impacts on more deep-seated concerns of development and justice in resource distribution. We believe there needs to be far more emphases on the issue of redress and facilitating a more equitable redistribution of water resources to support rural livelihoods. There is a need to engage local stakeholders much more effectively than has been done to date. Given the importance and numbers of smaller-scale farmers, we suggest that their access to water be better protected.



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There should also be greater attention to socioeconomic human rights, such as the right to livelihood, which are inextricably linked to access to water. Where regulation is really needed in terms of pollution, then a priority entitlement would assist in conflicts over use by large-scale users. Your email address will not be published.