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Spinning of facts will not solve Dar’s water woes
2006-07-17 08:38:45
By Hilal K. Sued
Water flooded the new Parliament in Dodoma last week and moved to drown those who are failing to deliver in the new acceleration.
These are government ministers who appear to be more preoccupied in spinning facts than providing lucid explanations to the unfavourable fallouts from their acts.
Or can we say that it was an earth tremor a not so strange natural phenomenon in the country’s phoney capital that decided to test the foundation of the new House chamber?
Not in the real sense though – the water analogue. To begin with the municipality has no history of floods. And even if we go by the ’’charity begins at home’’ aphorism, the government pronouncements in Parliament, through its ministers on the provision of safe and clean water to all Tanzanians by 2015 are mere illusions, if the municipality’s own water woes are conveying any message.
In fact the water crisis is countrywide, but there is no place where it is more telling than the city of Dar es Salaam and its environs. It has been so for nearly two decades now, with no one ready to say without mincing words that it will end any time soon. In our leaders jargon, ’’soon’’ is usually a decade or two.
Its magnitude is enhanced by the fact that Dar es Salaam has the largest concentration of population in a confined area and it’s where ministers, high government officials and other well-to-do people and millionaires live and who have hardly been spared by the problem, just in the same way as the poor folk of Tandale, Buguruni and Manzese.
The only difference could be that these officials’ live in posh areas of Mikocheni, Masaki and elsewhere in bungalows that have huge water reservoirs installed and heavy duty water pumps that suck up whatever little Dawasco water there is in the pipes system.
These pumps plus, admittedly, hundreds other smaller ones owned by those who can also afford scattered allover the huge metropolis ensure that any Dawasco water left in the system for other thousands of homes of poor people just trickles out of the taps by the drop, if it ever comes out at all.
Many of these homes could be official Dawasco consumers but cannot afford to buy water pumps. They are therefore Dawasco consumers in name only, and the water utility should stop bragging that it has customers by the thousand.
Because of this, some refuse to pay the monthly flat rate – pay for what service, they ask? Since water is a necessity of life, these poor people are even ready to spend several times as much each month to buy water by the bucket from the hundreds of water vendors in the streets even to the detriment of meeting their other pressing obligations such as paying for the school fees for their children etc.
Last week the Dawasco Area Manager, Deogratias Celestine said (Guardian, July 8) that 67 per cent of water consumers in Dare es Salaam are not subscribers of Dawasco, but illegal consumers.
He should have been clearer. It could be that the 67 percent are not Dawasco subscribers, but not all them are consumers of Dawasco’s water, let alone illegal consumers.
Or to put it correctly, they do not know, in fact they are not bound to know whether the water they consume belongs to Dawasco, from some hundreds of private boreholes in the city or even from its dirty canals and streams.
And since there is no law that says that all Dar’s residents must use Dawasco water, then the utility’s pronouncements is only part of fact spinning strategy – the fashion now preferred by officials to justify their failures.
The truth is that the 67 percent mentioned are not necessarily illegal consumers of Dawasco’s water, they should never be blamed for Dawasco’s woes. It could however be accepted that there are hundreds who may have connected themselves illegally to the Dawasco’s system, use the water they so obtain or sell it in tankers not to poor slum residents, but to the well-to-do people in the city’s posh areas where Dawasco service is problematic. The majority of ordinary people do not buy water in tankers.
Dar es Salaam water problem will never end because successive utilities companies that have been established or commissioned to provide the commodity adopt very wrong approaches when trying to solve it and that nobody ever seem to learn any lessons. Perhaps they don’t want to for reasons not fully understood.
First the government should admit that the problems came into being due to many years of negligence to the water supply infrastructure – that began in early eighties. That’s when illegal connection activities began.
And if the government admits that, then that is where the emphasis should go restore the infrastructure first instead of engaging in rigmaroling.
Dawasco cannot say that it lacks demand of the commodity it provides, only that its infrastructure is the one that is wanting.
It’s a gigantic undertaking because you are required to restore the system which now serves the population that has almost trebled.
It’s a price one pays for not nipping the problem in the bud. There were just too many good things in this country that started deteriorating while officialdom only stared instead of taking immediate steps to right them.
When Dawasco, the firm that came from no where and with no known experience in water provision took over from City Water last year, it saw that the best way to prove itself that was better than its predecessor is to be seen that it is able to collect more revenue into its till from the ’’customers’’ that were connected to the pooor infrastructure.
In its first self-appraisal late last year, just a few months of taking over, it announced that it had increased its monthly revenue collection over its predecessor, thereby bolstering the government’s grounds in its decision to kick out that ’’do nothing’’ City Water. Sure, give the dog a bad name and then hang him.
Dawasco’s ’’feat’’ in increasing its revenue collection does not mean anything at all, and is not in line with the expectations of thousands of City dwellers who have been yearning for the age long water scarcity problem solved, and are even ready to pay for it in Dawasco’s own official rates than what they are paying now to the street vendors.
And if the water utility had ever cared to make a survey, it would have found out that the number of the water vendors in the streets, especially in the poor neighbourhoods has increased considerably since it took over from City Water.
That should convey a blunt message that the water problem is still there and worsening despite a lot of talk from government officials, specifically from Dawasco whose main preoccupation is only to justify it existence.
Personally, I do not find any great difference between it and its predecessor, City Water. This idea of considering increased revenues as a yardstick to gauge the performance of our institutions is not a new one.
We are told that it being imposed upon us by the World Bank. However I doubt whether even the WB takes it seriously, even insisting it to be applied to the letter.
When the South African firm, Net Group Solutions took over the management of Tanesco in 2003, through the ’’barrel of the gun’’ it immediately moved to show that revenue collection had gone up.
It did not go up an inch, the only thing that happened was that the government immediately moved to release money to its ministries and departments Tanesco’s huge debtors - to settle their bills.
Many viewed it as ghoulish gesture by the government, principally designed to show that the foreigners were more knowledgeable and efficient in running our affairs than the indigeneous people.
We now know that they were not as Tanesco woes increased, much of it due to their poor management. It has accumulated losses of more than Sh 400 billion in three years, that is since Net Group took over (THE SUNDAY CITIZEN, July 16).
Part of that loss no doubt through false accounting, as recently reported by one Kiswahili weekly newspaper . However what may now be in the works is an attempt to attribute that colossal loss to drought, and that Tanzanians may find themselves with no choice but to obediently swallow that crap.
Last week former President Mkapa, under whose reign City Water was kicked out and Dawasco ushered in, broke silence following the City Water-Dawasco issue being placed in the spotlight by MPs in Dodoma.
Unsolicited and that’ what I found it odd he spoke of the issue and strongly came to the defence of the decision by his government to kick out City Water by stating the all familiar story that City Water was not delivering anything and was in fact going against what was agreed in the contract.
The truth of that will be known during the case which City Water, through its holding firm, Bi-Water has instituted against the government, perhaps including why its officials were unceremoniously chased out of the country as if they had committed some crime. What a way to break an investor’s contract, because it raised many questions.
The quizzing by MPs on the break of the City Water contract by the government was justified as there is a stark precedent in the government’s 1994 contract with IPTL, whose outcome is nearly bringing Tanesco to its knees. Once bitten, twice shy, as a saying goes.
Email: hilkharb@yahoo.com and hilal_sued@hotmail.com
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