The Water Scandal

TANZANIA is blessed with many rivers, lakes and ground water. Yet this plentiful supply of water is far away from poor families living in urban and rural areas, who must struggle to collect it for their needs; for them, it is a question of survival. The people of Tanzania are following closely a legal squabble brought against their government whose outcome will affect their access to clean water.

True debt relief?

In August 2003 the Tanzanian government was pressed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to privatise the assets of the Dar Es Salaam Water and Sewage Authority (DAWASA) as a condition for receiving debt relief. The bid for running the water and sewerage network was won by City Water consortium consisting of the British company Biwater, Gauff from Germany and Superdoll from Tanzania.

Despite the World Bank’s assurances that access to water for poorer residents of Dar Es Salaam would improve after privatisation, the price of water increased so much that the government decided in May 2005 to terminate their contract with City Water. People were turning to unsafe water supplies rather than paying the higher prices.

The Tanzanian government is now being sued by Biwater in a tribunal created by the World Bank. In August 2005, soon after their contract was terminated, Biwater lodged a case against the Tanzanian government for compensation for the cancellation of the 10-year contract at the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, an arm of the World Bank. The case began in April of this year in The Hague, and is being held in secret as requested by Biwater.

The Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK, spent almost $4 million on television advertising in Dar Es Salaam to promote the privatisation of water in 2003. That amount of money would have provided water for two million people in Tanzania.

NGOs to the rescue

Access to clean water and adequate sanitation is a basic human right. It reduces the risk of diarrhoea, one of the main causes of child mortality in developing countries. Water is becoming more expensive for the poor in the world. With governments forced to give away the responsibility of providing water, non-government organisations (NGOs) are working very hard in partnership with local communities to help the most in need.

One such partnership is a project which WaterAid and Simavi (two non-government organisations) have begun working on in Michese village (Tanzania) to install water and sanitation. This project promises to take thousands of people out of the desperate situation of seeing adults and children dying from lack of clean water and adequate sanitation.

In June this year I travelled to Tanzania, a country with a population of 37.6 million people, and an average life expectancy of 46 years. A few kilometres from Dodoma, the new capital city of Tanzania, is Michese village. At ten in the morning the sun was already burning my skin and drying the air we were breathing. Agnes Juma, who is 40 and a mother of five children, was cooking little cakes in the open air outside her house. She was up before five in the morning to collect water to prepare the breakfast for her family and for baking the cakes she sells.

“Today I spent two hours looking for water to wash my child and cook the millet for breakfast. We need clean water where we live, my son keeps becoming ill with diarrhoea.”

Near a few houses which make up the centre of the village, a group of women and children surround a three metre deep hole hoping to be able to extract some water for cooking and washing clothes, for many of them it is already their second trip to fetch water.

Nzinga fixes her headscarf in a round bundle on her hair to place the plastic canister she will be carrying the long distance home. “This is my second trip this morning, the first was to collect water for cooking breakfast and for the animals. This water is for cooking the lunch.” Her husband died from typhoid contracted by drinking contaminated water. “We need water; we cannot live without water; our children keep becoming ill, and are dying from diarrhoea.”

Women and girls normally dedicate four hours a day to collecting water; that is, if the family lives near water points. For other families who live further away it can mean walking up to six hours a day looking for water. The burden of collecting water falls mainly on women and girls who spend so much time looking for it that they miss out on their education.

Desperate faces

In Chigongwe, not far from the motorway connecting Dar Es Salaam to Dodoma, under the midday sun, a group of thirty to forty women and children were walking in the direction of the river. They quickly crossed the modern motorway with trucks and cars speeding past. They approached a group of women who are already there, and the two groups started arguing and pushing each other. They were fighting for access to a small hole on the dry riverbed which the first group had been patiently digging in the sand. They continued arguing for a short while, and then the second group walked away. In these difficult circumstances where water is so scarce, they were not prepared to share it with a group of women who belonged to another clan.

From a distance the water looked clean, but close up I could see how dirty it was. There were tiny worms, and who knows how many bacteria. The women were alternating between collecting and drinking the water. Nearly two hours later all the women had filled up their canisters. Some remained to guard the hole and washing clothes which they then laid out to dry on the sand.

Walking through trees, and fields of millet, corn and mango trees, I reached Msembeta, another village where a group of women, girls and men were fighting for the water in a well. It was three in the afternoon, and the owner of the well had watered his crops, and his goats and cattle had had a drink. Now it was the turn of the people in the village. They were allowed to queue to collect a couple of 25 litre canisters of water, but had to pay him beforehand for the dirty muddy water. An argument had broken out over the water, but after a while everyone managed to calm down, and they started to collect the precious liquid. Some of the women were so thirsty they were drinking cups of the dirty water straight from the hole.

One toilet flush

I could see the desperation on the women’s faces. They need water for their children to drink and for cooking; they need it for washing clothes and to sprinkle their vegetable plots. Then there are the animals, which also need water. A bucket they carry for hours on their head is just one flush of our toilets. The demand is endless and continues to grow with the increase in population. In Tanzania the population is growing by 1.7 percent a year; access to clean water is growing by 2.7 percent a year, but access to sanitation is static.

In theory, there is more than enough water for everyone in Tanzania, but in actual fact access to this indispensable liquid is far too expensive for those living on less than $2 a day; and this comprises 89.9 percent of the population. Yet governments are able to provide access to clean water for all their citizens; what is lacking is the political will to do this, as well as donations from rich countries. The construction of a well fitted with a handpump costs, in fact, just $1,427, and would cater for one hundred households or five to six hundred people.

Poverty is closely linked to lack of clean water in rural and urban communities. In this context the result of the legal case by Biwater against the government of Tanzania will affect profoundly what happens in other countries, where water has also been privatised.

Can the poor of the world afford to lose this battle?