We'll cut off your water 'with love', Amupanda
Mayor promised to "restore your dignity", but targeted the vulnerable with water cuts
To demonstrate the point of how dangerous lies can be to the public health, it is useful to take note of the difference between what Job Amupanda said and knew about the water problem, and what he did.
What Job Said
In 2021 Unam Professor Amupanda co-published an article with Ralph Marenga, called Coronavirus and Social Justice, in which they argued that it was a very good thing that the government had stepped in to stop the water cuts and provide a free lifeline water supply to households during the pandemic. Indeed, they said, this life-saving measure should not be a “once-off intervention” but should be “a permanent component” of government’s social responsibility. (p.15)
‘The prevention of Covid-19 is reliant on practicing hygiene, which requires water.‘
Indeed they seemed glad that,
The [government] made provision for subsidising water supply during the lockdown period. The declaration of the SOE [State of Emergency] by the president saw the minister of urban and rural development give a directive to all local authorities for the reconnection of water to households that were closed due to non-payment.
They cheered the fact that
“… all communal and water sources in urban informal settlements were now accessible without key cards or tokens. This water supply intervention is expected to cost government about N$10 million. As a necessary intervention, the poorest people in the communal areas and informal settlements were the biggest beneficiaries as access to potable water has been a serious challenge…
What Job Knew
in their analysis of the situation they attributed the “high housing backlog and the general lack of urban housing” not to the failure the market and policymakers to address the problem but to “poverty and inequality” — an answer which should hopefully lead them to more questions.
They nevertheless note that ‘by 2017, Namibia’s housing backlog had already surpassed the 300,000 mark by government’s own assessment, and was expected to rise to 311,000 houses by 2030. They said the problem was exacerbated by high increases in housing prices that exclude the poor and low-waged, as 90% of households earned less than N$2 700 a month in 2016...’
Amupanda must therefore have been fully aware of the high poverty rates and youth unemployment, because by his own account, by August 2019 around 1 million Namibians lived in informal settlements, as government reported, mainly without water, sanitation and electricity.
We have thus shown that Dr Amupanda knew full well the importance of access to water to contain the pandemic. Moreover he wrote that there were ‘’colonial imbalances that deprived a majority of those in rural areas access to potable water and sanitation.’ He had many years earlier argued (0:50) that the government leaders failed to take the socio-economic status into account when dealing with the poor and,
”the sooner some of these idiots leave office the better.”
In his 2021 paper, Amupanda argued that this “once-off intervention” to provide a subsidised lifeline of free water to the people should be made ‘'a permanent component of government responsibility.’ (p.15). They identified “the need for potable water and sanitation as a priority to redress the colonial imbalances that deprived a majority of those in rural areas access to potable water and sanitation.” (p.9)
Thus, Job told us he is advancing an “anti-neoliberal critique” for “an interventionist state,” (p2), but in practice, as we will see, he preferred the market to decide who gets water and who must do without; outsourcing his stated commitment to social justice..
What Job Did
‘Cutting your water with love’
Once in office, he started ordering water cuts within three months of taking the mayoral seat. In council on February 2021 he announced (00:54:00) water cuts to households and various institutions, albeit he had just published an article calling for a basic free lifeline of water, but now he said: “there is no alternative”.
In February they also approved cutting off water to various ministries, including the ministry of youth, and other public institutions without warning, regardless of the potential impact on public health, and the risk to people not associated with the debt.
A notice from Council went out to Windhoek households in March that they would start cutting water connection. from 6 April 2021:
In April 2021 Amupanda said (00;54:00) “We will have our money before a person uses.” He told the City executives to proceed aggressively with the prepaid plan, starting with “the vulnerable and defaulters”
During the announcement of cuts in February 2021 he gave his full support (00:54:00):
“We support [the water cuts and prepaid meters] generally, we support it with love (he, he, he). We support those decisions, we are 100 percent behind you, it’s being done with love.”
Amid the Covid restrictions many businesses had shut down and people were sheltering without income, yet the City coalition under the leadership of Job and IPC/LPM/PDM/NUDO proceeded to disconnect the water of the people who had just voted them into power.
Covid infections rose sharply
It is notable that with other regulations in place, the Covid pandemic had remained somewhat under control at this time. To cite an earlier report by the present writer,
The decision to resume water cuts also undercut all the efforts and sacrifices made by the community to ‘flatten the curve’ over the preceding year, because once the winter began to take hold from April to May the country started seeing record numbers of daily infections, with the weekly average Covid 19-related deaths rising from 4 per day in March to over 75 deaths per day in July.
The data showed a strong correlation between the start of water cuts in the capital and the sudden escalation in Covid infections and excess deaths.
Amupanda and Marenga in their article, Social Justice, neglect to mention that the present writer alongside the DRC Concerned Group led the campaign to open all the taps, following the declaration of emergency lockdown measures in late 2019.
In September 2021, I reported — something the mainstream media completely ignored — that the data showed:
‘Over 2500 people died in Namibia during the Third Wave in the four-month period from April to July 2021 since the water cuts started: that is FIVE TIMES more Covid 19-related deaths than the entire preceding year (523).’
Thus Amupanda was fully aware of the actual social and historical conditions that caused such a wide gap of inequality and the problems of affordability and deprivation in the country, as well as the public health dangers of water deprivation.
Moreover, despite repeated public appeals to prevent the mid-pandemic water cuts, especially in winter, the mayor persisted, although he had told us in his paper on Coronavirus and Social Justice (p.15) that
“A basic need such as water should not be one that is made available to the poor only on account of a pandemic.”
Indeed, he wrote that the decision of the authorities to reconnect households whose water had been cut over debt was “a welcome relief to the poor”, yet he proceeded at first opportunity to cut the lifeline water supply of the poorest and most vulnerable.
We must conclude from the above that Job was lying when he wrote against water disconnections and in favor of state subsidies for basic free water supply beyond the pandemic, because — despite knowing the context and the risks that he outlined in his 2021 article — he was prepared to disconnect water supply amid the pandemic to households and institutions. We must also find it is a lie to say you are depriving the poor and most vulnerable of their lifeline water supply “with love”, because if that were true the word ‘love’ would have no meaning.