Ghana Water War

Ghana: Fight Against Water Privatization

The price of water in a community increased 300 percent in just three years, this recently happened in Ghana, West Africa. By raising the price of water the Ghanaian government paved the way for foreign investors to take over the country’s water system. This will affect 7.5 million people in thousands of people in hundred of cities and towns.

An effort by the Ghanaian government to privatize public water supply and management continues to meet fierce opposition from the country's National Coalition Against the Privatization of Water (CAPW). The National Patriotic Party government’s plans are tied up with the World Bank’s ‘market liberalization’ strategy pursued on behalf of the global corporations. The World Bank has offered an interest free loan of $150m to re-equip the state-run Ghana Water Company and hire new management. Under the plans, new management would operate, maintain and sell the water under a 10-year contract in what would be an obscene form of so-called public-private partnerships.
Water supply in Ghana's cities and regional capitals has worsened over the past two decades. But campaigners say this is due to poor management and lack of investment in infrastructure. Most homes in urban cities have water tanks to store water because the taps run only for a few hours for two or three days a week.

And in parts of

Accra, such as Teshie-Nungua, Madina and Adenta sprawling residential areas in the South-east and North-east residents pay somewhere between 500 cedis and 1,000 cedis (5-10 cents) per bucket of four gallons from private suppliers the official Ghana Water rate is 64 cedis.

According to, Ameng Etego is the spoke man of the National Coalition Against the Privatization of Water in Ghana, ‘you can't privatize something as close to air as water, and allow market forces and profit motives to determine who can and who cannot have some to drink for the Some 300 million people around half of Africa’s population have no access to clean water and sanitation.

The World Bank recently reaffirmed its policy of tying loans to bringing in the private sector. Plans for water privatization began under the previous Jerry Rawlings government and were actually opposed by the National Peoples Party (NPP) while it was in opposition. When the HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) initiative was developed in the late 1990s, Ghana opted not to sign up, despite being eligible. In contrast, one of the first acts of the new NPP government, brought into office in 2000, was to join HIPC. But debt relief and poverty-reduction programmers come with conditions. Central to the IMF, World Bank and even bilateral agreements has been the condition that the government press ahead with its privatization programmes, including that of the water sector.

According to Alhassan is the leader of National Coalition Against the Privatization of Water in Ghana, In 1995 the government decided to privatize Ghana Water and ask for bids. An American-based company bribed the minister in charge with $5m, and the newspaper Public Agenda revealed this. The government was unhappy that this was happening in the election year of 1996 and therefore postponed privatization and left it out of the election debate.

The idea was once again floated in 1999, when the union representing staff at Ghana Water said the company should not be allowed to be looted. During that period there were many demonstrations, with the key demand that all forms of privatization and divesting of state enterprises must be stopped. Then in 2000, the NPP won the general election and announced that Ghana Water Company must be put on fast track for privatization. A group of organizations and individuals then called a conference in Accra opposition parliamentarians, unions, students, workers and water workers. From that came the Accra Declaration committing themselves to fighting privatization and calling on Ghanaians to join the campaign.

Initially, Adam, a member of the National Coalition Against the Privatization of Water in Ghana, explained, the government prepared a bid document that said the government would invest $500m and the private company would have to match that with $70m. Government sponsored advertisements denounced the campaign against privatization as “anti investment and anti-development”. And because it was at the height of the storm over the attack on the World Trade Center, they tried to link campaigners with terrorism.

The campaign then heard that the private companies were going to invest $70m but they were going to borrow it from the Ghanaian government. Then CAPW learned that they had reduced the figure to $30m. So in reality, there was no investment at all. The Ghana peoples already had experiences of such bogus privatizations, where they companies fail to make money they pack up and run away. But the government doesn’t see the provision of water, electricity, education and health as a priority.
The mining companies taken in profits from this town and repatriated those profits without investing any of it here. If only a trickle of these profits had been invested here it would have been possible for people to have free water. Instead a steady trickle goes into the pockets of a chosen few in Ghana who then have to live in houses that are like concentration camps. They have to build high walls with barbed wire and on top of the barbed wire an electric fence. And they live like that because they have concentrated the resources that everyone should have shared into their own pockets.

The relentless fight of the CAPW has slowed the implementation or privatization. The government had set up a department to oversee the sell off, mostly public relations and finance people, with only a few water engineers. But the timetable for the bid mandate expired and this department has now been closed down. According to Dr. Granfedeal Ayitomeka, is famous social Worker explained that the NPP government was failing the people on all fronts, not only the privatization issue, they would create opportunities for people to have access to water, electricity, health care education, sanitation but three years later the economic statistics are rapidly deteriorating and the country is in a very terrible crisis.

If you commodity water, turn it into commodity, then the poor will be forced to drink unwholesome water. Guinea Worm infestation in Ghana is already now second worst in Africa next to Sudan a country where there has been civil war for the past 20 years, in order to ensure efficient and clean supply of water it must go into private hands, which will bring in capital and expertise. This is no different from when Ghana was struggling for independence and was told we were not ready for independence.

The government conducted an investigation into the running of Ghana Water, which has never been made public. But the Coalition believes that it showed that the government departments responsible for Ghana Water were mainly responsible for any inefficiency. And one of the individuals particularly identified as responsible is one of the leading figures in water privatization. The problems here are not to do with lack of technical knowledge

After two decades of structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in which literally anything that could be sold was sold, Ghana still remains ‘a highly indebted and poor country’. After the 20 years of implementing Structural Adjustment Programmes, economy has remained weak and vulnerable and not sufficiently transformed to sustain accelerated growth and development. Poverty has become widespread, unemployment very high, manufacturing and agriculture in decline and our external and domestic debts much too heavy a burden to bear. For the 13.5 million Ghanaians who live in urban slums and rural areas and who represent 75 per cent of the population, even this rare honesty from a minister of state was an understatement.

Since 1995 when the World Bank pushed the Ghanaian Government to develop specific options to privatize the country’s water service, the poor have been systematically deprived of their right of access to safe water. The price of water has been increasing at an alarming rate, in order to set the stage for the Bank’s treasured principle of ‘full cost recovery’. Pro-privatization consultants hand-picked by the World Bank are peddling it for all they’re worth, turning the Bank’s involvement into a front for the transnational corporations interested in taking over Ghana’s water. Leading the pack are the French companies Vivendi, Suez Lyonnaise and Saur. In hot pursuit is Biwater of Britain; in March 2002 the IMF stated that Ghana would get the next tranche of its loan under the so-called Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility only if it aimed for full cost recovery in all public utilities, including water.