Water privatisation: a worldwide failure?
Jimmy Orogobeni, now 25, has been waiting all his life for safe clean water in his Lagos home. In 1999, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) proposed a vast expansion of the city’s water supply, raising real hope that a British or French company would lay pipes to the sprawling Ajegunle slum.
The IFC plan was rejected as “appalling” by the head of the Lagos Water Corporation, who said it was unworkable and too expensive for the city. But in the following years, donor governments, banks and a succession of European and American business consortia all went to Africa’s largest metropolis with plans to take water to people such as Orogobeni.
Like the IFC, most proposed awarding a single giant water company a long concession in return for providing technical expertise and millions of water connections.
But the companies, banks and donors all left, unable to agree with the federal or local authorities how to satisfy corporate demands, raise the billions of pounds inevitably needed, and convince the Nigerian public that international companies would fulfil their contracts and not make unreasonable profits from the sale of what was widely seen as a public resource.
For Orogobeni, his family, and more than 15 million other Lagosians, the impasse means continuing to pay local water suppliers a hefty premium for unsafe water.
About 80% of Lagos’s piped water supplies are thought to be stolen, only 5% of people receive it in their houses, taps are often dry, sanitation is non-existent across much of the metropolis and the hospitals are full of people suffering diarrheal and other water-borne diseases. All that has changed since the IFC’s abortive 1999 plan is that the demand for water has grown due to the arrival of millions more people in the city.
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The latest organisation to have failed to negotiate a Lagos water agreement is the IFC – again. The private arm of the World Bank, which has lent more than $75bn for water and sanitation projects around the world since 1995, has been in secret talks for more than a year with the city’s private water company about funding another possible private-public partnership (PPP) scheme. But this week it categorically stated that negotiations had broken down and were unlikely to resume for years.
“Contrary to recent reports, IFC has not signed any agreement with the Lagos Water Corporation (LWC),” said an IFC statement. “LWC expressed interest in working with IFC and we had a number of discussions on how we might be able to assist the company. In the end, IFC decided not to advise LWC. We continue to support the government and people of Nigeria in achieving their development goals.”
A spokesman added: “It is unequivocal. We did talk to Lagos for about 18 months and we have now decided not to continue these discussions.”
Where near-universal access to water has been achieved, it has virtually always been through a public commitment
The rebuff is a blow to the IFC, which has long been the world’s largest funder of global water projects, providing advice for governments and loans for companies to take over and invest in under-resourced water and sanitation systems in developing countries, often as part of a broader set of privatisation policies. According to the IFC’s data, it completed 847 water projects between 1993 and 2013, nearly half of which were in Latin America.
But water privatisation has been politically hot since Britain became the first and only country to sell off its entire water industry in the 1980s. Many IFC projects have been opposed by coalitions of political and environmental groups amid fears that market water prices would increase way above what the poorest could pay.
Since the early 2000s, political anger has mounted with the result that far fewer water projects have been proposed, and many fewer people have been connected to clean water than the World Bank and G8 countries might have expected when the the millennium development goals were signed in 2000. According to the latest IFC figures, about 768 million people still lack access to clean drinking water, 2.5 billion people are without safe sanitation and roughly 3.5 million people die annually from water-related diseases.
The tide has turned on privatisation
Research shows that the tide of water privatisation has now turned. Many cities that rushed to sign 20-year or longer concessions with water companies in expectation of clean water at a socially acceptable cost have chosen to terminate agreements and return urban water provision to public control.
A report by the Transnational Institute (TNI), Public Services International Research Unit and the Multinational Observatory suggests that 180 cities and communities in 35 countries, including Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Paris, Accra, Berlin, La Paz, Maputo and Kuala Lumpur, have all “re-municipalised” their water systems in the past decade. More than 100 of the “returnees” were in the US and France, 14 in Africa and 12 in Latin America. Those in developing countries tended to be bigger cities than those in richer countries.
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http://www.theguardian.com/global-de...gos-world-bank
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