Visiting local communities in Ghana

I’ve been taking a break from UNCTAD today. I decided to pass on the opening statements by Ban Ki-Moon and the Ghanaian president John Kufuor and visit some local communities in Accra instead with activists from the National Coalition Against Water Privatisation (NCAP). Old WDM hands will recall that in 2004-05, WDM campaigned with NCAP to stop British water company Biwater from bidding for a water privatisation contract in Ghana. This was a privatisation process which had received support from both DFID and the World Bank as well as several UK consultancy companies including Halcrow and Adam Smith International. Well, after being deluged with WDM postcards and feeling the heat from campaigners in Ghana, Biwater did withdraw their bid. But the privatisation went ahead anyway, and the management contract was finally awarded to a strange joint venture between Dutch and South African public water companies!? This joint venture, AquaVitens Rand Ltd (AVRL), is acting as a private water operator and started the for-profit contract in 2006. I was interested to find out how they were getting on…

I went round both Mamobi and Nima communities with Adam Mohammed Sanusi from NCAP. Both Mamobi and Nima are informal settlements that have grown up around a large marketplace. People live in small concrete houses or corrugated iron shacks and water coverage is very patchy. Pretty soon we came across a private yard tap where water was being sold to local residents, because they don’t have taps in their own home.

Mariam Usman told me: “It takes me 30 minutes to walk here to collect water and I do this 5 times a day for the 16 people who live in my household. Each time I pay 0.1 cedi. We have a tap in our home but there has been no water in it for 4 years! Help us – we need water! Today is Sunday and so I am coming to collect the water so that I can go back and wash my clothes. I am a street vendor but it is very hard to have the time to collect the water too.”

Next we met Jennifer Essador, who was just along the street and was working on a tea stall with her mother: “We need to buy water for our household and to be able to run our tea stall. We pay 0.1 cedis for 1 big container. We had a tap in our house but it has not worked for maybe 20 years! To get a new connection it might cost perhaps 2000 cedis which you can only afford if you run a successful business as that it is a huge amount of money.”

Sanusi tells me that, “There are maybe 200 private water companies selling purified water in Ghana. One is called Kausur as this lorry shows. You can pay 0.05 cedis for one 500ml sachet of water. I drink this water even though it is very expensive in comparison to the ordinary water which is 0.1 cedi for 20 litres or 1 gallon! I drink it because we have tested some samples of the piped water and it shows that while it looks clean, in fact there are particulates in it and it is not safe to drink. We try to educate people about this but it is very expensive for them to buy the purified water.”

Next we meet Bature Djangeru, who is a builder and also Sanusi’s landlord!

“The situation is much worse now than before privatisation. As there has not been much water in our taps, we have been to picket the offices of the water company to complain but the police came and told us to go away! The company still sends us the bills though and tell us that they are working to improve the situation. They should really just leave the company to the government as it is very simple – they are doing an inefficient job. Round here it is a favourite topic of conversation! It’s not that we don’t have competent managers in Ghana; it’s just that whenever we get World Bank money, we have to accept managers from overseas and they have to be paid far higher salaries than Ghanaians, and in dollars. It’s just inefficient.”

We now enter an adjacent community which is Nima. As it is approaching Sunday lunchtime there are lots of street-side chop houses and stalls selling a cornflour staple dish called tuo-zafi. It’s now baking hot in the midday sun and I’m relieved to find some shelter while I chat to the local assemblyman (like a local councillor), the Honourable Abdul Majid Logoh.

“We get water twice a week sometimes or maybe only once a month occasionally. In March there was a time when we were without water for 2-3 weeks. At that time, we then have to ask our wives and children to collect water, sometimes from maybe 3-4 kilometres away. That means that the children can’t always go to school. It’s worse. Lots of areas don’t have water but actually the bills have gone up a lot in two years – maybe even by 100%! If you can’t afford to pay, you get disconnected. Recently the water company and a government minister came along here and disconnected lots of households because they had not paid their bills. As an assemblyman I find it very frustrating when I see people carrying buckets to collect water. People also come to me to complain about the sanitation situation here. There are not enough refuse containers and so people have to dump their waste where they can. Also, the government has now passed control of community toilets to other groups and the price has risen from 0.02 to 0.05 cedis to use them! I have been to them and talked to them about this but we have not resolved the situation yet. The sanitation situation here is serious. There is no underground sewerage and so people store their solid waste in pits which get emptied or they put their waste water in these channels. There are problems with typhoid, malaria and cholera in this area – people get sick and sometimes die.

So, what’s the verdict on the privatised management? They certainly inherited a difficult, far-from-perfect situation but many people I spoke to were concerned that things were getting even worse. NCAP’s work continues. The contract contains clauses that the government can terminate the contract if AVRL does not meet the targets set out. NCAP believes that this situation is now present and are urging the government to stick to this commitment and bring back public management, with enhanced community and democratic oversight and far more public investment.

Vicky Cann