By Servaas van den Bosch
KAVANGO, Namibia, Mar 3 2009 (IPS)

What if a well-intended programme to democratise water management is really a poverty trap? This is a question a soon to be published study on Namibian rural water supply poses to decision makers.

Poor rural water users like Sipoya Ntumbankuru pay a disproportionate share of the cost. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

Perhaps the harvest will be good and she can pay her water bill in kind. But her strength is leaving her and already she needs help lifting the heavy water drum on her head. What will happen when she cannot work the field anymore?

In theory every household in Epingiro pays the equivalent of $1.50 U.S. per month to the local Water Point Association (WPA). Those with livestock pay a dollar extra. This goes towards the diesel that the borehole pump uses and to pay the ‘pompa boys’; young men who regulate the water supply and carry out small repairs.

It might not seem much, but for Ntumbankuru and many others the water bill is a recurring nightmare and she is often many months behind with her payments. In rapid Rukwangali, she complains about the politics behind the WPA.

Without metering of any kind, the pompa boys control the flow of water per household on an ad hoc basis. The premise is that the pump should only run once a week. As cattle consume infinitely more water than individuals, in many WPAs, the poor are subsidising the rich.

Rural water supply – affecting half of Namibia’s 2 million people – touches on a sensitive apartheid legacy. The South African Water Act of 1956 tied water rights up with land tenure, thus restricting access to boreholes. Communal farmers received water for free, a policy that was designed – successfully – to create dependency on the regime. By repairing pumps and supplying diesel, the colonial government ensured loyalty from the rural population.

The main focus of the rural water supply reform programme, started in 1997, was cost-recovery of operation and maintenance of boreholes. Although ecological sustainability is mentioned in many policies, protection of resources seems secondary to the decentralisation process, say experts.

“The reform is meant to empower people by giving them ownership of the infrastructure, they will manage resources more sustainably”, says Timo Katumye, of the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry in Rundu.

Water Point Associations (WPAs) were started all over the country and formalised by the Water Resource Management Act of 2004. Under this legislation, water is still owned by the state, but the WPAs are responsible for collection of levies and repair of infrastructure. Of the 7731 communities using a water point, 5213 have established a WPA.

In Epingiro the government has invested in two, thousand-litre, plastic reservoirs to replace the open cement dam. The pump has been fixed and a wooden fence erected to keep the cattle from damaging the water point. The ‘rehabilitation’ is a sure sign that the facility will be ‘handed over’ soon. In Ministry jargon this means shifting all costs for the water supply to the WPA.

Pompa boy Hausiku Joseph is not sure what to think about that. First of all he wasn’t around when the villagers elected him as one of seven Water Point Committee members, the executive that runs the WPA. And although he gets the equivalent of $7 U.S. a month for this honour, the money is gathered as the need arises.

“We tell people to go cut grass for the thatching industry whenever we need money for the WPA”, he says. Contributions are usually only made in the dry season. “As long as there is rain people won’t be bothered to pay.”

He thinks the old colonial system worked better: “The South Africans used to pay for everything, this government should also provide water for free.”

But the Ministry steams ahead with the decentralisation process. ‘Phase 3’ which sees the handing over of water points, commenced in 2007. By July 2008 nearly ten percent of all water points had been transferred to WPAs. This puts the government on target to hand over 26,57% of all water points by the end of 2009.

But behind the figures is a grim reality. Of the 4331 water points that rely on boreholes – and not on piped water – 2207 are solely or partly dependent on diesel pumps and struggle with the same problems as Epingiro. While wind pumps (1136) require less maintenance, communities serviced by hand pumps (851) are possibly worse off, as these often break.

Government still provides essential maintenance for the vast majority of the WPAs, even after they are handed over.

Complete cost-recovery is, therefore, not realistic, thinks Thomas Falk of the Biodiversity Monitoring Transect Analysis (Biota) project, a German-Namibian research endeavour that studies human and climate impacts on the environment.

Falk, who studied the impact of the water reform on livelihoods, stresses that in a society that is already ranked as one of the world’s most unequal – with a gini-index of 74.3 and 38.2 percent of the rural population living below the poverty line – any added expense in the form of maintenance is obviously a problem. He suggests a pause to study renewable energy alternatives like solar pumps, or an income grant system for the poor.

“The reform touches on the fundamental question whether access to water is a human right that should be free for those who cannot afford it,” says Falk.

But, while laudable, this principle makes it hard to promote responsible ownership, in the experience of Harald Koch, director of Rural Water Supply at the Ministry in Windhoek. Nor does the current practice of rushing in to fix the pumps do anything to establish a network of private contractors.

“Politicians like to say that ‘all taps must be open’. It is not politically expedient to cut people off from the water supply,” he explains. “This has an adverse effect on the reform. It probably would be better to enforce a system that is based on payments per head of cattle and on subsidies for the poor.”

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