Commercialisation of waste management in South Africa
Date
2001-06
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Abstract
The collection of household refuse – or the lack thereof – is one of
the most powerful visual benchmarks of inequality in South Africa.
Although the situation has improved somewhat since 1994, formerly
whites-only suburbs are still kept immaculately clean with regular
door-to-door refuse collection and teams of street sweepers, while most
black township and rural area residents are forced to dump their refuse
in open spaces or in unsealed communal skips. Street cleaning is often
non-existent, and where it is available workers are often unable to cope
with the volume of uncollected waste. As a visual indicator of change,
solid waste management acts as a daily reminder to millions of poor South
Africans that their health, safety, and living environments have changed
very little in the past seven years.
Municipal governments in South Africa have been turning increasingly
to commercialisation (i.e., privatisation, outsourcing, corporatisation) as a
way of addressing this refuse collection backlog. Why this has happened,
and how successful it has been at addressing the problem, are the subjects
of the two papers in this collection. The first paper looks at a micro-enterprise
refuse collection programme in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, known
as the Billy Hattingh scheme. The second looks at the newly-corporatised
refuse collection service in Johannesburg called “Pikitup”. Although very
different in their institutional make-up and size, these two initiatives are
both driven by the same commercialisation impulse that is reshaping the
waste management sector throughout South Africa. The papers also offer
remarkably similar insights into the dangers of running waste management
‘like a business’.
This introduction provides a summary of the findings of these two
research reports and groups them into four themes: concerns about the
entrenchment of a two-tiered refuse collection system; a lack of proper
public consultation in the commercialisation process; the loss of public sector skills; and the impact of service restructuring on municipal workers.
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Keywords
WASTE MANAGEMENT, SOUTH AFRICA, PRIVATIZATION, SANITATION SERVICES, PUBLIC SERVICES, GOVERNANCE, CLASS STRUGGLE