The Harare City Council (HCC) recently issued an odd equivalent of
an edict or decree. It announced, rather
ominously, and like an arrogant overlord of our urban life, that it is shutting
down house water supplies in at least eight residential areas of Harare. The
reason it gave for doing so is that there are too many defaulters on paying not
just for water but other charges such as refuse collection, sewerage and other
amenities.
It turns out that the announcement is intended to have at
least two effects. To scare
residents/ratepayers at the prospect of having no water at all and therefore
scramble to largely pay part of the amounts due. Even if they have queries or
issues about the bills they have received.
The second effect is to ensure that with the fear of further water
supply disconnections, residents of Harare will increasingly opt for the
pre-paid water meter option (which is already in pilot phase in some suburbs).
It is an interesting strategy that is being used here. It involves not only convoluted and abstract
importation of ‘business models’ as to how to run a city and dismissing democratic
values in favour of technocratic ones. The latter also includes statements from
incumbent Mayor Manyenyeni that implied that he views elected councillors (who
also elected him) as being too ignorant to run a city. How he remains in office after uttering such
remarks in the first place remains an oddity.
Such views are throwbacks to local councils that were run under the
Rhodesian regime that continually refused majority poor residents of the then ‘African’
townships the franchise on the basis of ignorance, downright racism, assumptions
of superiority by class and a lack of education.
This is the sort of attitude that informs decisions such as
the one announced on water cuts by the HCC.
It is an arrogance that wrongly appropriates for itself a specific superiority
based not only on irrelevant educational qualifications and the ridiculous assumption that having
studied a business degree or worked in some sort of managerial position in a
private company is what it takes to run a city.
This strategy also involves the collusion of the HCC with
central government and private capital. The
local government ministry protects council from further scrutiny and public accountability
only if it does its bidding. Especially
with regard to the awarding of tenders and adhering to specific directives. Private capital then wades into this undemocratic
and opaque relationship by angling for the tenders that it produces. And the big prize for private capital is that
of the prepaid water meter supply and distribution tenders. There is also that of the electronic billing system
for rates that will be linked not only to mobile banking but also the internet.
It would therefore follow that private capital would not want to upset its convenient
positioning in the apple-cart.
With all of this in mind, what the HCC, with the permission
of central government and excited anticipation of private capital, has ordered
is an assault on the right of Harareans to water.
From whichever angle one looks at it, the threat of the
denial of access to water in lieu of lack of payments for other amenities is an
assault on human dignity and livelihood. The actual act of disconnecting the water is
an inhumane act that even if it occurs next door, it would make our own rainmakers
weep and worry whether indeed their libations for rain will be heeded.
Someone might ask but what is the solution? It certainly is
not denying residents access to water en-masse
or even threatening to do so. It lies in
discarding elitist notions of what it means to be a resident of any urban
settlement, shaking off our colonial hangover understandings of what is best
practice of urban local government and integrating a people-centred and democratic
approach to policy making and administration of councils. It also means making the HCC abandon its
neo-liberal privatisation projects that seek to turn what is public capital into
private profit.
To do all of this, residents, either through their associations
or other forms of community based organisations (churches included) with a special
concern for the livelihood and well-being of not only their children but also
their neighbours must question the HCC more than they are currnelty doing. This means having a greter understanding of
the city that they want, one that must be inclusive, welfarist, people-centered
and democratic without the evoking of notions of a ‘qualified franchise’.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)
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