2.2 KiB
| title |
|---|
| The Anti-Privatisation Forum |
The Anti-Privatisation Forum (https://apf.org.za) and the Coalition Against Water Privatisation are a national social movement and activist organisation based in Soweto and Orange Farm, districts in the West of Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2003 they coordinated a series of acts of civil disobedience in response to the installation of prepaid water meters. The meters left significant numbers of poor households without adequate water for their survival, the APF and CAWP undertook the illegal removal of the meters from disconnected households and freely reconnected them back to the water supply.
Meters are the proposed “solution” to water scarcity in Johannesburg. The idea has been to commercialise it, with the assumption that treating water as an economic good will ensure more careful consumption at household level. Johannesburg Water (a private company, where the state is only a shareholder) sought to limit water consumption of the poorest neighbourhoods through the installation of prepayment water meters and flow restrictors.
At that time, South African constitution guaranteed citizens the right to access ‘sufficient’ water, called Free Basic Water Supply. This allowance was 6 000 litres of free water per month - based on a calculation of 25 litres per person per day in a household of eight people, which was deemed to be adequate. With PPM, households were mostly cut off at mid-month, on day 12, after that inhabitants would have to try to get water from areas that don’t have meters. The burden of work, particularly for women, increased. If that was not possible, residents had to resort to any water they could find, which is most likely going to be unsafe.
With installations beginning in 2003-4, Orange Farm and Phiri residents began resistance, working with the APF, CAWP and other organisations, with a campaign “Operation Vulamanzi” (“Operation Water Flow” or “Water for All”) which ran in parallel to campaign around electricity, where same thing was happening. In a number of direct actions, radical plumbers (and radical electricians) by-passed the meters, re-connecting people to supply, often visibly dumping the removed meters in public spaces.
Text by Kim Trogal