Don't privatise water, union advise government

Members of Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE), in collaboration with Public Services International (PSI) and Environmental Right Action (ERA), have cautioned against privatising water.

The unions said water is a right, which cannot be priced.They urged the public to oppose the proposal, adding that the situation might compound what they described as the "global water supply crisis".

In a statement by AUPCTRE President, Adelegan Solomon and General Secretary Yusuf Zambuk, the union said: "We have been voicing out our concerns for the broken promises of water privatisation under the guise of Public-Private Partnership (PPPs). This is because PPPs are more concerned about profits maximisation, which is imperative of the private sector.

"These broken promises include but not limited to corruption, lack of transparency, contract and financial manipulation, poor service quality; under-investment, unsustainable and unbearable tariffs, which will make water inaccessible to the majority of the citizenry and inadequate financing."

The statement said as a result of these obvious realities, more cities and governments are bringing water back to public hands, not only in Africa, but also in the global north.

The unions warned that while maximising profits under PPP or privatisation, the public is made to drink unsafe water and become vulnerable to water-related diseases, such as cholera, diarrhoea, typhoid fever. These result to mass deaths and also make governments spend more in providing health services to the citizenry.

To improve the effectiveness of one partner in providing public water supply and or sanitation services, the unions suggested a Public-Public Partnership (PuP) as an alternative to the Public-Private-Partnership arrangement.

"To us, PUP means an alternative to the PPP, which is Public-Public Partnership. PuPs are peer relationships forged around common values or interests and objectives, which exclude profit seeking. The absence of commercial considerations allows public partners to re-invest all available resources into the development of local capacity, to build a mutual trust which translates into long term capacity gains, and to incur low transaction costs, the unions said.

According to them, the comparative advantage of PUPs over PPPs extends to more ample opportunities for replication and scaling up.