Dear Editor,
The falling out between the government and Severn Trent is one of the many ironies in our country. After all, this is a company which reportedly has a poor reputation in England, its country of origin, which failed in Trinidad and Tobago, and to which Guyanese objected strongly. Now Severn Trent’s contract is being terminated for failure to meet its obligations, but this comes only after it spent most of the money paid through the “aid” budget of the UK government.
I have no interest in defending Severn Trent but I am convinced that the “water problem” lies very firmly with the government and with the board which is carrying out the government’s unworkable policy. The company accepted basket to fetch water and naturally failed. Cost recovery was never an option. It couldn’t be an option in the interior where the costs of providing the water are very high and the people’s incomes very low. It couldn’t be an option on the coastland either where the company relied on high cost electricity to pump the water, making the cost of providing it higher than poor people could pay. Thus we’ve had the shameful fact of a company which can’t cut off water in England cutting off the water supply of poor women and men in Guyana.
Guyana is a member of the Com-monwealth which has carried out a number of studies on the privatization of water and found a number of cases, especially in Africa, where governments had to step back from the usual norms of privatization in favour of a form of community management in which communities decide who is in a position to pay and how much. That is the minimum we need here. What we should really have is free water. Cost recovery should not be a policy, especially for the provision of services which are about life. Ask any of the grassroots women now in a state of shock about the rise in the price of water, which they more than anyone else depend on to care for their children, not to mention the plants they grow and the chickens they raise as an essential part of their household budgets. As many others have said before me, the privatization and cost recovery policies that the International Financial Institutions force on countries like ours are hostile to poor people and particularly hostile to poor women.
We need to know in clear, unequivocal terms how the government proposes to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on water and sanitation when this goal is in almost direct contradiction with the cost recovery aim that was pushed by Severn Trent on behalf of the government.
Yours faithfully,
Karen de Souza
