Water defender Mohammed Reza Sahib speaks out. In Indonesia, he leads the fight for the right to water as a public good and is one of the activists who helped bring about the country's historic halt to water privatisation.
"The people win the Supreme Court appeal against water privatisation." This was the headline splashed in large type across the Jakarta Post, one of Indonesia's leading national dailies, on 10 October 2017. Within hours, the news spread like wildfire across the social media feeds of researchers, legal experts, non-governmental organisations and think tanks around the world engaged in the fight against violations of the right to water.
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"A historic result for the struggle for the right to water as a public good," explains Muhammad Reza Sahib, 43, an activist with the organisation Kruha and one of the minds behind the historic halt to water resources privatisation — a challenge that, however, quietly continues to this day. We caught up with the water defender at his home in Jakarta to find out more about this great struggle.
The large-scale privatisation of Indonesia's water resources began in 1997 under President Suharto. His government had made the privatisation of public companies a priority. It was the period of the Asian tigers crisis, and the International Monetary Fund was dictating terms to every state requiring loans through structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). Among the conditions attached to a $92 million loan to the Indonesian government was the requirement for private sector participation in the water management of Jakarta and its ten million inhabitants.
"It was the beginning of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in service management, creating a new model in government-business commercial agreements," explains Reza, who always prefers to be referred to by his second name. "The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed, in Indonesia as elsewhere, a neoliberal turn in water too, incorporating its privatisation into a package of macroeconomic reforms."
In 2005, a law was passed for the full privatisation of water. But the state of the water service did not improve. On the contrary. Only 40 per cent of the capital's population managed to have direct access to the water supply. Much of the water delivered remained non-potable in various neighbourhoods of the city. And the treatment plants were not operating at full capacity. Tariff increases, moreover, served only to keep pace with the cost of running the private service, which had grown to guarantee extra profits for management and investors. It was the first great failure of the privatisation of public sectors.
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"The management companies ended up leaving families without water for more than five months when those families could not sustain the cyclical increases in their bills," Reza recounts. So much so that the government was forced to intervene — at its own expense — to improve the water service. Indeed, under the contract, all maintenance costs fell on the public purse rather than on the four private companies, which instead bore responsibility for setting tariffs.
Discontent grew. "Many young activists began organising, and that is how Kruha was born. The aim was to bring water back under public control. We organised public meetings and demonstrations, increasing pressure on Parliament. Then, suddenly, while the law to accelerate liberalisation in 2005 was being approved, two Supreme Court judges accepted our request to halt the agreement for the first time, also making the documents public, duly translated."
The Supreme Court determined that the poorest sections of the population did indeed have limited access to drinking water, a restricted water supply (limited to evening hours), and a poorly maintained sewerage system. "People had to buy bottled water or water from tankers, or sink new unauthorised wells, disrupting the balance of the water table," explains Reza.
It is not, however, a true victory. Once the international spotlight faded from civil society's 2015 win, municipal utilities in Indonesia remained trapped by private interests. "The government's tendency towards privatisation is still strong in Indonesia," the activist says grimly. "Water management is still very poor because the country lacks the expertise. Although local attention from citizens and activists remains high, companies — in particular the Salim group — remain very active in pushing for privatisation. A new front has opened up, which I am now fighting on. Unable to manage distribution in the city, companies have shifted to the upstream sector: dams, reservoirs, major water management infrastructure. There is also great interest in mega-infrastructure projects to contain the impacts of climate change."
Jakarta is in fact sinking ever further, and there are fears that by 2050 the city will be partially submerged. "Large offshore dams will be needed. But our fear is that if managed privately, they could be used as leverage for new privatisations."
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And the private sector is playing dirty. "To distract public attention, they renamed public-private partnerships 'government and business entity cooperation mechanisms' (in Indonesian, Kerjasama pemerintah dan badan usaha – Kpbu)." So there is still a great deal of work to do. "We need to work increasingly with rural areas where these immense infrastructure projects are being built and where private players have shifted their interests," explains Reza.
"The battle for water has never been straightforward. When I started out as an activist in 1995 in Sumatra, simply calling yourself an 'activist' was enough to risk being killed — many people disappeared. Even today the challenge persists in rural areas where there is less oversight. In Jakarta you can be co-opted, corrupted. But in rural areas, you risk your life."
