Urban informality, water and politics: An introduction

Undoubtedly, uneven geographies of development within cities, let alone states in sub-Saharan Africa, complicate the issue of water sustainability. Yet it is within these challenging contexts that we are tasked with implementing both political and physical infrastructures that support sustainable water use, equitable access and the distribution of safe water. This includes inclusive governance and resource management. Since 62% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population lives in informal settlements, it is imperative that we focus our attention on the structurally maintained precarity that characterizes life in settlements such as Mathare in Nairobi and Makhaza in Cape Town.

In rapidly and unevenly growing cities in the Global South, unreliable access to clean, potable and safe water marks inequalities between urban residents. Water sustainability has emerged as a buzzword within and beyond development circles. It features in regional institutional reports, government reports and of course, broader public discourse about our use and access to this vital resource. In this blog, water sustainability will be invoked with the understanding that it encompasses systems designed and managed to fully contribute to the objectives of society, now and in the future, while maintaining their ecological, environmental and hydrological integrity. (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017) As such, I believe in the importance of discussing hydropolitics beyond security policy and moving towards the everyday micropolitics that shape the day-to-day lives of African informal resident populations. 

What does that have to do with politics?

Protests in Cape Town between 2011 and 2013 demonstrate the structural nature of inequitable water access. Residents’ (in)ability to live in sanitary conditions and use toilets in ways they deem dignified, serve as evidence of the political nature of the problem. During the poo wars, while mobilizing for improved sanitation facilities in settlements such as Makhaza, activists and community members advocated for themselves around the fact that the state had failed to realize a promise of equity made at the dismantling of the apartheid state. (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017)

Cartoon by Godfrey Mwampembwa

In Nairobi, Kenya, Article 43 of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution which guarantees every Kenyan’s right to adequate clean water can similarly be invoked to condemn the failure of local and national governments to meet residents’ needs. (Kyaa, Kasina) Politicians are cognizant of these resonances and in Kenya, they supply water to the urban poor… in attempts to garner their votes. In 2017, Mike Sonko (then senator of Nairobi) launched his “Sonko Rescue Team '' to  provide water and other essential services to urban informal settlement residents that ordinarily should have been provided by the state and not instrumentalized as a campaign strategy, never again to be mentioned post-election.  

 Across cities such as Cape Town and Nairobi, the politics of dirt and water reflect contradictions of urbanization, modernity and post-colonial equity that have yet to be adequately addressed and resolved. Further, race and class, through which contemporary urban inequality remains mediated, remind us that the problem of water access is not solely one of service delivery but also, of entrenched historical disparity.

Maynard Swanson’s analytical framework of a sociopolitical syndrome is a useful point from which we can begin our analysis. He espouses that the question of sanitation is “inseparable” from the questions of race, social segregation and the development of urban planning as a means of the reorganization of urban space. (McFarlane and Silver, 2017) Thus, I argue that we can barely begin to discuss addressing the challenges of sustainable and equitable access to water in the African continent without addressing the political conditions that make inequitable access to water the reality of so many of the continent's inhabitants. A focus on urban informal experiences provides a window through which we can understand and critically evaluate the micro politics of water and begin to meaningfully address historical and contemporary challenges regarding water and development.