‘… ostensibly “pro-poor” policies like free basic water are at the same time profoundly punitive through their links with debt collection’.

‘Instead of dangerous high-tech fantasies, we urgently need vigorous public debate over equitable access to a vital and dwindling resource in a society marked by brutal extremes of wealth and poverty’.

While pundits have been busy dissecting the latest round of so-called ‘service delivery’ protests, a massive shift in municipal indigence policy, spearheaded by the City of Johannesburg is passing largely unnoticed in the mainstream press. Launched on 24 June this year, the Expanded Social Package (dubbed Siyasizana) is an ambitious effort to bar-code the poor with far-reaching implications.

Siyasizana changes the management of poverty by local government fundamentally, but it has received remarkably little public attention.

Most immediately, Johannesburg has abandoned the universal model of free basic water in which all households receive 6 kl of free water a month, with high-volume users cross-subsidising low-volume users through a system of ‘stepped tariffs’. In practice, free basic water requires restricting those in arrears to the minimum allocation. In formal townships where, historically, residents have had access to water and electricity at a low, flat rate, this is a deeply conflictual process – for larger households with flush toilets, 6 kl a month is brutal.

The key point is that ostensibly ‘pro-poor’ policies like free basic water are at the same time profoundly punitive through their links with debt collection. Their logic turns around sorting out the ‘can’t pays’ from the ‘won’t pays’, and making things sufficiently unpleasant for the former to force the latter to pay up.

In 2003, Johannesburg Water launched the controversial ‘Operation Gcin’amanzi’ (Save Water) in the Phiri section of Soweto. Residents had to accept either a yard tap or a prepaid water meter that delivers 6 kl of free water a month and then shuts off.

In July 2006, five residents of Phiri, led by Lindiwe Mazibuko and represented by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, launched a high-profile and thus far largely successful legal challenge to the adequacy of the minimum water allocation and the constitutionality of prepaid water meters. In September 2009, the case will be heard by the Constitutional Court, whose judgement is likely to have hugely important ramifications throughout the country.

Siyasizana is Johannesburg’s answer to the Mazibuko case, replacing the universal provision of free basic water in the City of Johannesburg with an elaborate system of means testing. In fact, since 2006 when the Mazibuko case was launched, Johannesburg households that qualify as indigent have been eligible for an additional 4 kl of water a month.

Siyasizana represents a radical departure from this system. Instead of identifying households based on income (or house value), Siyasizana trains its sights on the individual – or, more specifically, on individuals defined in terms of special needs and pathologies.

In addition to disease, advanced age, ‘very low basic skill level’, and residing in a household headed by a child, pensioner or single parent, these include ’history of abuse, history of substance dependency, ex-combatant status and prior incarceration/history of criminal activity’.

To register, individuals have to appear at a customer service centre with a South African identity document. They will be fingerprinted, and the fingerprint ‘will be used as confirmation that the City has permission to verify information about them with other government information systems’, according to information on the city’s website.

Each applicant’s details will be run through the Department of Social Development’s National Integrated Social Information System (NISIS), which combines data from the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), the South African Social Security Administration (SASSA), the Department of Housing and the Department of Home Affairs.

They will then be assigned poverty ‘scores’ and placed in one of three bands that determine the level of assistance for which they qualify. In addition to allocating varying levels of water and electricity, the three packages include transport, rental and rates subsidies – as well as registration with the Jobs Pathways programme ‘designed to help people become economically self-reliant, and ultimately lift themselves beyond the need of Siyasizana’.

The Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) is deeply critical of Siyasizana, pointing to the chronic under-representation of low-income households in registration-based endeavours, the demeaning character of the application process, and the lack of public consultation. CALS points out that in 2001, Johannesburg authorities estimated about half a million households in the city to be indigent – yet in 2008 only 108 000 households appeared on the indigent register.

In other words, the City of Johannesburg is embarking on an experiment that is both unfair and dangerous – especially if officials do, in fact, limit free water to those on the indigent register. One should recall that a major impetus for the free basic water policy was a serious cholera epidemic in 2000/2001.

There is, in fact, a large body of experience with indigence registers in other parts of the country. Most smaller cities and towns have never been able to implement the universal model because cross-subsidies require a relatively large proportion of high-volume users. The nightmarish quality of indigent registers is made painfully evident in a report issued by the Directorate of Free Basic Services in the Department of Provincial and Local Government in 2005 entitled:

“Study to Determine Progress with and Challenges Faced by Municipalities in the Provision of Free Basic Services and Supporting those Municipalities Struggling with Implementation”.

The City of Johannesburg no doubt aspires to use the integrated database to escape the nightmare. More likely Siyasizana is a high-tech pipe dream that seeks to render technical that which is inherently political and conflictual.

Since 2001, Ladysmith and Newcastle have witnessed ongoing conflicts over water meters, definitions of indigence, debt collection and efforts to restrict water. That they have not exploded into open warfare has a great deal to do with the inability of officials to impose water restrictions.

Blame cannot simply be laid at the feet of incompetent officials and lazy, corrupt councillors. Even the most dedicated municipal officials and diligent, accountable councillors find themselves in an impossible position because of how municipal indigence policy operates in practice.

In short, with their new Orwellian strategy of techno-fixing poverty, officials of the City of Johannesburg may well be heading into a far deeper and murkier political quagmire of measuring and monitoring indigence than that in which their counterparts in smaller municipalities have been flailing around for some time.

Instead of dangerous high-tech fantasies, we urgently need vigorous public debate over equitable access to a vital and dwindling resource in a society marked by brutal extremes of wealth and poverty – a debate in which the ‘targets’ of ‘pro-poor’ policies must be active participants.

Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography at University of California Berkeley and Honorary Professor at UKZN and is a member of the Amandla! Collective.