By Takura Zhangazha*
In the first calendar week of 2025, the Zimbabwe government announced its intention to privatize water in the capital city of Harare.
The minister for local government, Daniel Garwe, in a recent press
conference said the following,
“Last week Friday, we were given the green light to privatise water services. We are now in the process of inviting private sector players, both local and international, to bring proposals, expressions of interest. These are going to be unsolicited bids. We want somebody with the capacity to engineer, to procure, to construct and manage the finance. That’s the model that we are working on. Engineering, procurement, construction, management and finance.”
He indicated that the processes of making this a reality had
already begun when he added,
“These are unsolicited bids. So, as we speak, we’ve already
received about five expressions of interest from local players and three from
international players. So, it’s work in progress. By end of next week, we would have identified the most
suitable people that have applied and appointed them, at least signed a
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), and then a Memorandum of Agreement…we want
by the end of this month (January 2025) to have dealt with the issue of water
in Harare”
For many a progressive and accountability activist the
question that may immediately emerge is one of procurement and tender
procedures. And of course a blind
worship of capitalism in its local neo-liberal formats such as the misplaced ‘ease
of doing business’ mantras. More-so
where it now appears that the government is now focused on privatizing the
precious natural and global resource that is water.
And no doubt there are those that have been announced as
having submitted expressions of interest (whom the government only knows) that
are probably waiting with bated breath to pounce on this new ‘get rich quick’ monopolization
of water and its treatment for public consumption.
This is mainly for at least three reasons.
The first being that they know the Harare water crisis context and quite literally see an opportunity to make profits based on the disastrous water treatment and management by the current Harare City Council (HCC). In seeing this opportunity, they are, together with central government, aware of how ‘disaster capitalism’ works.
One in which interested parties argue that the failure of a component of the state to provide a key public service can only be remedied by passing over that responsibility to private players and ‘market forces’.
Including
entering this new so called ‘water market’
with the attendant tax exemptions and concessions from central
government. And for sure there will be
some sort of official launch of the first such project as we have now become
familiar with when it comes to other such investment frameworks in mining and
infrastructure construction.
The second reason is linked to the first. Essentially this move by the minister of
local government is one made with a probable awareness of the political meaning
of water and water supply. And also with
a keen understanding of the desperation of many a Harare resident to simply wake
up with a tap that has clean running water in their homes or within their immediate
vicinities.
This desperation has led many Harare residents to seek underground water at high cost, put together mini- water collectives to put up boreholes in a number of our high density areas. With others reverting to their political parties to at least get basic wells (covered and uncovered) to be dug at a central point (kuchibhorani). I won't talk about the churches, their faith related boreholes and their role in this water conundrum.
So almost any immediate solution to a water crisis is welcome to many a Harare resident.
Many have individualized their solutions to their water problems based on their own income/wealth (and occasionally boasting about it in social circles- a shocker to be hones- how can one boast about having water when others don’t. It not as if Cholera skips houses in its occurrence). With limited consideration of the fact of the dwindling underground water supply in Harare. You now basically have to dig deeper for your borehole.
The third reason is that as it is, water and its provision, not only in Harare but other major cities has been undergoing what I consider to be an 'experimental commercialization'.
In any direction of Harare there are multiple suppliers of water that many residents are using. They have natural sources of this water that they store and transport at ridiculous cost to individual residents as and per request. With the most profitable being the richer neighbourhoods where council water is rarely supplied. So water has already become sort of business.
Especially with the current drought we are undergoing. Water is sadly increasingly being viewed as a commodity and not a right. A development that if not us but our children will rue or probably eventually fight over.
In encapsulating these three aforementioned reasons it is fairly evident
that the question of water and water supply in Harare is now patently ideological.
This includes questions such as, "What is the right water in
both its legal/constitutional or humanist sense? How equitable is the framework
of its distribution both in urban and rural areas? And finally how fundamental
is the role of the state, parastatals and public administration in ensuring
clean water delivery in an equitable manner?"
These questions are rarely raised in their ideological
context because of a general mistrust and low expectations of the public good
role of central or local government by Zimbabwe’s public. Let alone the residents of the capital city
Harare which is poised to become the optimal laboratory of the privatization of
water in the country,
The alternative solutions to this are very ideologically
apparent. If water is a human right and
also a human necessity for all, then it is the state’s primary obligation to
ensure it is provided. Not through the
whim of profit motivated individuals or their corporate entities who can argue any one day that they do not
have chemicals or financing and revert to the state for bailouts in one form or
the other.
If we improve our public administration of water, the relevant
local and central government owned
public enterprises can function on the basis of revolving door funding based
on generally affordable, accepted and accountable water taxation systems. Through this we
will have a much more people centered solution to the water supply crises.
But as most of us are now increasingly aware, the ‘politics
of the belly’ have affected the political parties that are in charge of either central or local government.
We must rise above this and remember that water, though in
need of treatment and transmission to homesteads and villages, is not invented
in a factory. It is natural and every human being has an inalienable right to
it.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
(takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)
(takurazhangazha.com)
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