Out of Africa — Dry times in Mwanza City

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2012 (5058 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When living by the shore of the second largest body of fresh water on Earth, East Africa’s beautiful Lake Victoria, one would think that water is the last problem on anyone’s mind.

However, in the five weeks leading up to Christmas of 2011, almost one-third Mwanza City’s 1.5 million residents (myself included) were not to see even a drop come out of the tap.

Living without water is, to say the least, a problem easier to discuss than to actually experience.

Among the fortunate with rain collection tanks, the absence of running water meant little more than some extra labour to haul buckets of water from the backyard and blunt negotiations with the neighbours to share the supply in a manner that didn’t leave everybody dry within hours. For the vast majority, collecting enough water for basic washing and cooking (far less laundry) was an affair of evolving dimensions.

On any given day, it is not uncommon to see women and children trekking up to two kilometres to source open urban water supplies. However, during the monthlong outage, the trickle of water carriers in the city noticeably increased to a steady stream. Lines at local water supply points were commonly described as taking more than an hour to navigate and women resorted to taking the bus halfway across the city to get a pail of water from friends and family.

While the outage was crippling for many in both time and labour, to the more enterprising it was an economic boon.

During the monthlong spell of dry taps, a sudden industry sprouted among people with carts and trucks — the private sale of water. Most of the time I am quick to praise the entrepreneurial spirit of Tanzanians; however, I ate a great deal of those words during the more than 30 days of the outage. It is impossible to justify what can only be described as price gouging for what we consider a fundamental human right in Canada. Under normal circumstances, those without running water are able to purchase a bucket from a public water point for about two cents a bucket. From the newly emerging water vending industry, the cost increased dramatically to an average of 35 cents a bucket and peaked at 75 cents. A local friend of mine was forced to purchase water for his small family at a typical cost of one-third of his daily income. His water requirement during this time was about six buckets per day for all three people in his home. That’s $3 per day for 120 litres of water.

It is nearly impossible to consider the same circumstance in the Canadian context where an average citizen, far less household, consumes 300 litres of water daily. Were water to cost 50 cents for every 20-litre bucket, each person, far less household, would need $7.50 a day just for tap water … and every flush of the toilet would cost 30 cents.

Although the water finally returned to Mwanza on Christmas morning, answers have never been clear as to why it stopped flowing in the first place. Neighbourhood rumours ran from reports of pump failures and electrical surges killing control boards to a micro-chip expiry in the computer system that would cost US$30,000 to replace. Calls to the water authority were nothing more than an opportunity to hear a recorded message that operators were unavailable and the story never really gripped media at any significant scale. A water outage lasting more than a day, far less one that impacts half million people for a month, is newsworthy in Canada. In Tanzania, it was nothing more than a short note during a year that was long on deadly infrastructure and service delivery failures.

The year 2011 was a time in which an aging arms warehouse massively exploded on the periphery of the nation’s capital, an inter-island ferry sank with an estimated 200 lives lost and urban flash floods claimed another 40 souls.

Whether wet or dry, the question gaining rising volume throughout Tanzania is why a disaster (or several) generates little more than a political speech of condolence. Although the kind words and promises of leadership are beginning to sound hollow for many in Tanzania, they may also hold a ring of truth as to how so little urgency could be experienced during Mwanza’s monthlong water outage.

Really, it was nothing more than just a drop in the bucket.

» Josh Sebastian is from Brandon-Westman and is currently working on international development projects in Tanzania, East Africa.