Stop the privatization of Lagos' water

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Corporate Accountability International

June 25, 2015

(no link, an email)

As you read this, millions of people in Lagos, Nigeria are faced with the daily task of figuring out how to get safe water. And we're not talking about a few low-income neighborhoods here. A whopping 90 percent of Lagos' 21 million residents don’t have daily access to safe water. Why? One big reason is that for years the World Bank has promoted the privatization of their city's water systems, strong-arming public officials and preventing the development of adequate public systems. It's outrageous.

And the people of Lagos have had enough. Our allies in Nigeria at Environmental Rights Action are leading a powerful movement to challenge corporate water privatizers and demand the human right to water. And we've got their backs. Just weeks from now, water justice activists from around the world are joining our friends in Lagos to set a roadmap that will protect the human right to water not just in Africa's largest city but around the world.

Millions in Lagos rely on costly or unsafe water sources such as poorly regulated wells, partly because the World Bank has pushed for a corporatized water system and prevented truly democratic public solutions from thriving for decades. For many, water arrives not through pipes to their homes, but through shared standpipes, or in jerry cans or cellophane bags. They're often forced to get their water from unknown sources at a markup charged by the few people who have access.

Recently, intense pressure from members like you and the people of Lagos forced the World Bank to back off yet another move toward privatization of the city's water. And this mighty grassroots movement in Lagos -- and around the world -- is making sure the new governor of Lagos commits to public water systems. The momentum is on our side, but we can't let up now.

Nigerian trade unionists push to stop water privatization

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In Nigeria, tens of thousands of people are standing together to protect their water from global corporations. With one voice, they have taken up a call: Our Water, Our Right. They have issued a powerful demand for the Lagos government to reject privatization plans.

As mentioned in PSI’s report “Why Public-Private Partnerships don’t work”, which contains a combination of 30 years of research and assesses the PPP experience in both industrialised and developing countries, PPPs have failed to live up to their promise. They are often an expensive and inefficient way of financing infrastructure and services, since they conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies.

Lagosians like Akinbode Oluwafemi, Director of ERA, are rejecting the privatization plans that the World Bank has spent decades paving the way for, because they know the disastrous results of other World Bank-backed projects: Rates are hiked, workers are laid off, and families find it harder than ever to access clean, safe water.

The Nigerian unions said, “It is well past time that we got serious about resolving these problems. Access to clean and safe water and sanitation services is the minimum that we demand of our government. Is this really too much to ask? Is it even credible that, in the 21st century, we can’t ensure universal access to water and sanitation?”

That is why the stakes are so high. The World Bank and the global corporations it supports want Lagos to set the precedent for who controls water in Africa. The privatization of Lagos' water will put millions more lives at risk across the continent and we cannot let that happen.

PSI stands with the people in Lagos to defend their human right to water and sanitation, challenges the government to stand up to corporate water privatizers and supports Lagosians in their fight to keep their water in their own hands

http://www.world-psi.org/en/nigerian-trade-unionists-push-stop-water-privatization


Water Privatisation: A Worldwide Failure?

2015•02•20 John Vidal The Guardian

Like the IFC, most proposed awarding a single giant water company a long concession in return for providing technical expertise and millions of water connections.

But the companies, banks and donors all left, unable to agree with the federal or local authorities how to satisfy corporate demands, raise the billions of pounds inevitably needed, and convince the Nigerian public that international companies would fulfil their contracts and not make unreasonable profits from the sale of what was widely seen as a public resource.

For Orogobeni, his family, and more than 15 million other Lagosians, the impasse means continuing to pay local water suppliers a hefty premium for unsafe water.

About 80% of Lagos’s piped water supplies are thought to be stolen, only 5% of people receive it in their houses, taps are often dry, sanitation is non-existent across much of the metropolis and the hospitals are full of people suffering diarrheal and other water-borne diseases. All that has changed since the IFC’s abortive 1999 plan is that the demand for water has grown due to the arrival of millions more people in the city.

The latest organisation to have failed to negotiate a Lagos water agreement is the IFC — again. The private arm of the World Bank, which has lent more than $75 billion for water and sanitation projects around the world since 1995, has been in secret talks for more than a year with the city’s private water company about funding another possible private-public partnership (PPP) scheme. But this week it categorically stated that negotiations had broken down and were unlikely to resume for years

Where near-universal access to water has been achieved, it has virtually always been through a public commitment.

The rebuff is a blow to the IFC, which has long been the world’s largest funder of global water projects, providing advice for governments and loans for companies to take over and invest in under-resourced water and sanitation systems in developing countries, often as part of a broader set of privatisation policies. According to the IFC’s data, it completed 847 water projects between 1993 and 2013, nearly half of which were in Latin America.

Full article: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/water-privatisation-a-worldwide-failure

[msongs]

1. sounds like they are being TPP'ed nt