Nairobi’s blue tankers: Reflections on commodification and privatization

 

Image by Davis Otieno from Urbanet

In 2005, while he was UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan stated that “it is the absence of broad-based business activity, not its presence, which condemns much of humanity to suffering”. While some have argued in favor of philanthrocapitalism and business as a driver of social change, it is difficult to support this when reflecting upon the privatisation of water which is an essential resource.

Kenyan social justice activist Wangari Kimari describes the chasmic difference between Nairobi’s affluent and poor urban population in her comparison of Runda (home to numerous embassies and UNEP headquarters) to residents in Mathare surviving on a single glass of water daily despite Nairobi county having an allocated budget of 36 million US dollars. Runda residents however, can afford to create their own water company and construct boreholes for clean potable water while residents in Mathare pay a poverty penalty; up to four times more for cholera-infested water that is additionally inadequate and/or inconsistent. (Kimari, 2019) This is not an alienated case. Of Nairobi’s poor Eastlands community, Kimari writes of families’ children dying a mere day after drinking dirty water and elderly women’s access to water that “smells and looks like sewage”. (Kimari, 2019) As such, we must problematize corporate development which claims to be meeting a provisioning gap.

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This state of affairs is created and maintained through Nairobi’s grossly inequitable political economy. Rather than fulfill their mandate of providing clean, potable water (a constitutional right) Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NWSC) permitted water cartels to supply salty water to households that already had piped connections. (Kyaa and Kasina, 2021) Water cartels at the county level and NWSC create shortages and controls the price and supply of water including infrastructure (or a lack of it). Participatory water rights research with some of Eastlands’ residents found a demand for: (a) a restructuring of systems to stop water privatisation and increase accessibility for the urban poor and called for the closure of bottled water companies due to their operation as cartels. (Kimari, 2019) 

Providing water in this way is simply unsustainable, deeply unjust and Nairobi’s tankers must go. I find myself in agreement with Kimari and the community members she interviewed in calling for an end to privatised water services that exploit the marginalized urban poor and attempts to instrumentalize their manufactured water scarcity for political gain and electoral campaigning only to neglect the same communities.