contaminant media

In Orange Farm township, near Johannesburg, communal street taps with free water have been replaced with pre-paid water meters in people’s homes. You have to put money on a card and insert it into the meter before you get water. Pre-paid water meters mean that if you’ve got no money, you’ve got no water.

Pre-paid meters also break a contractual and communicative relationship between the state and the people. In Apartheid South Africa, non-payment of bills was a form of protest by the people against the state. With meters, there are no bills. Legal rights to water access are compromised by water meters.

There has been fierce opposition to the meters. The Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee was formed. In the end some pre-paid meters were destroyed. Protests and the struggle to survive are on-going. A legal challenge against the meters was launched by residents of Phiri (Soweto township) who have also been subjected to the pre-paid meter system – the court judgement is due in 2008.

The brains behind the prepaid water scheme come from a place very different to Orange Farm. In 2002, a short car-ride away from Orange Farm in uptown Johannesburg, the United Nations held the “Second Earth Summit”. During the summit, public-private partnerships were promoted as a solution to environmental and social problems. Suez, the largest water multinational corporation in the world, was one of many corporate delegations working the summit with very significant negotiating power. Coming full circle: it was Suez – in partnership with Johannesburg Water utility – which introduced the prepaid water meter scheme to Orange Farm.

The video is dedicated to Emily Nengolo, who was shot dead in her home in Orange Farm in the beginning of 2003. She was very active in the community, including the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee. The attack is believed to be politically motivated. No one was ever brought to trial for her murder. It was in the wake of her death that video activists and filmmakers from around the world contributed footage and shared resources to make the first edits of this video – so that news of the Orange Farm struggle could seen and heard and Emily’s death would not go by unnoticed and unmarked.