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Water, White Gold

Johannesburg then and now

by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com

February 25, 2005

Just as desperate kids in nearby shantytowns lined up for water at standpipes as Earth Summit delegates converged upon Johannesburg in 2002, H20 is still a scarce commodity in the region.

According to the London Sun, 80,000 bottles of mineral water quenched the thirst of 60,000 delegates to the Johannesburg Earth Summit on Sustainability.

While the delegates from 182 countries have long since gone home, the children of Alexandra, a shantytown just down the road from the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, still go thirsty.

Chronicled in the Corporate Watch video, White Gold, Alexandra is "a settlement of largely self-built homes of poor black Africans, hardly changed since the apartheid era, where unemployment and AIDS are rife."

In poignant fashion, White Gold points out that "just down the road from the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, home to the World Summit on Sustainable Development venue, a human and environmental tragedy is being played out that has nothing to do with sustainability and everything to do with big businesses' push for profits at any cost."

Some of the huts in Alexandra have mains water, but since the city's water services were sold off to French-based multinational Suez (formerly Suez Lyonnaise) the bills have tripled and many people can no longer afford to keep the water flowing.

Drinking untreated river water slakes their thirst. One year before the Earth Summit, Alexandra fell victim to a cholera outbreak, which claimed four lives in February, 2001.

Starting to evict the squatters was the initial government response.

Much of Johannesburg's water comes down the Vaal River from the highlands of the tiny, landlocked country of Lesotho, redirected by the first two of a series of huge dams. The Katse Dam, completed in 1998, the Mohale Dam, completed in 2001 and four other planned dams, drove the price of water sky high.

The notion of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project dates back to the mid 20^th century, but only actually got under way in the political unrest of the 1980s. In spite of sanctions against South Africa, because it was then technically dealing with Lesotho, in those days a military dictatorship, the World Bank funded the massive project.

Opposing the project during apartheid, the African National Congress adopted it after taking over South Africa.

In a textbook case of "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink‚" the dams have been anything but a solution to the people of the Lesotho highlands. A good deal of Lesotho's beleaguered economy is based on subsistence farming. With the Katse Dam alone displacing several thousand people, dams have flooded valuable agricultural land in the river valleys.

Flooding dams have forced farmers into the slums of the capital city of Maseru, or to villages up the mountainside where any land available is already spoken for.

Food handouts are ostensibly supposed to take care of once self-sufficient farmers. But Lesotho, like much of southern Africa, teeters on the brink of famine.

Decreased water flow affects more than humans. A study of the rivers downstream of the dam shows severe pollution, the death of fish and vegetation and increased human and animal diseases.

The silence of summit sustainability do-gooders is deafening.

Project contractors are part of a consortium, including Balfour Beatty, called to court in a corruption scandal in Lesotho.

The money flow of this sad tale is steeped with bitter irony and plain hypocrisy: The poor and starving of South Africa pay inflated prices for H20 that many in the outside world take for granted, from which Suez creams off a profit before passing it on to the Lesotho and South African governments‚ bypassing the displaced poor of Lesotho. The governments then pay the court-chased contractors and World Bank loan repayments. The real money ends up in the pockets of Northern multinationals and banks.

Even during the luxury fest known as the World Summit on Sustainability & Development, Johannesburg activists were concerned about the water-flow.

Studies indicate that literally half the water from the vaunted dams doesn't even make it to consumers' taps because the pipe system is so poorly maintained. The magnitude of the problem can be understood in the amount of water that escapes. There is so much of it that it is actually disrupting the scrubbed ecosystem around Johannesburg.

As well as reversing privatization on the principle that water access is a human right, at last count activists were calling for the dam project to be halted and the money diverted to fixing leaks and promoting water conservation measures.

That was the scene in August 2002 when heavy hitters attended the World Summit on Sustainability & Development in Johannesburg, and that is the scene in the Alexandra of today.

If the United Nations wanted to make a meaningful difference to sustainability, they were sitting almost right on it in water-starved Alexandra.

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com