Lush green lawns and shimmering swimming pools will soon cocoon rich, pampered individuals buying luxurious IRS villas from the daily drudgery of lesser mortals trying to make a living in Paradise Island. We will be greeting two million tourists on these shores in the next few years and nobody seems too bothered about the terrible effects on our inadequate infrastructure and our ability to supply basic necessities to our population.

The country is looking forward to the much needed foreign exchange that an extra million tourists will bring; but how are we going to manage when traffic problems are already horrendous now and we find ourselves unable to run the Central Water Authority properly in order to reduce to the minimum the criminal waste of water from broken pipes and to provide an adequate water supply to our population? If proof was needed that the CWA is grossly mismanaged, the ?water riots? in Palma provided eloquent testimony to the fact that appointing political friends to lead basic utilities services is a recipe for disaster. We would never dream of appointing a plumber to carry out a surgical operation (although some people would contend that he might do a better job than many of our so called doctors), so why have we meekly accepted for the last twenty years the appointment of people who know nothing about water distribution and supply to head the only organisation charged with supplying water to the whole island?

?We would never dream of appointing a plumber to carry out a surgical operation??

Recently, some people have mentioned privatisation as the panacea for all our water distribution problems whilst conveniently forgetting that it is management inefficiency and the lack of any future planning that is responsible for the difficulties that we face every year. Let us look at the miserable record of privatised water industries in some Third World countries: the French multinational company, Suez, has terminated its 30 year contract after only ten years of taking over the water supply system in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, two major provinces in Argentina; the logic behind this privatisation at the behest of the World Bank was that private companies would bring technology, management know-how and investment to the failing public water operators. What really happened was a lack of the investment promised by Suez to expand the infrastructure whilst increasing water rates and cutting off those unable to pay the new, extortionate prices. Suez has also been forced to leave its contract to supply water to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the private sector was seen by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and governments like Britain and France as the only way of raising the money needed to improve water supply, and international companies such as Suez, Thames, Vivendi, and Biwater rushed to privatise the water of the poor; they negotiated contracts which gave them monopolies for up to 30 years and guaranteed profits of up to 30-40 %. Prices shot up, people lost jobs, the poor often did not get the water promised, and discontent grew. Over the last decade, there have been riots in Bolivia, Trinidad, Argentina, Thailand, the Philippines, Ghana, South Africa, and Tanzania. Tanzania has cancelled its contract with Biwater, which had been working in Dar es-Salaam with the German engineering firm Gauff under the name City Water, claiming it has failed to deliver. Three large water companies, Bechtel, Edison, and Abengoa were kicked out of Bolivia following ?la Guerra del agua? (the water war) as a result of water prices jumping between 45% and 300%.

When the head of SAUER, the world?s fourth largest private water company can tell the World Bank that the private sector could not deliver for the poor because ?the scale of the need far outreaches the financial and risk-taking capacities of the private sector?, we have managers of Lilliputian intellect in Paradise Island willing to waste tax payers? money egregiously on so called feasibility studies to prepare the ground for a privatisation scheme that has already failed in the rest of the Third World; or they want to talk about the bastard son of privatisation called the Public-Private Partnership as the solution to our water supply problems caused primarily by their own inefficiency and lack of proper planning.

How about finding some local solutions for our local problems instead of always trying to look clever by adopting policies that have already failed in the rest of the world? But that has always been the problem with Paradise Island: too many people making dithyrambic speeches with the sole intention of impressing their political masters with an intelligence that remains unrecognized by the rest of us. The last person to have a vision about the future needs of this country was SSR, who managed to build the autoroute to Port-Louis in the face of wild opposition by political pygmies who could not see that the Mauritian?s obsession with the motor car would lead to the horrendous traffic problems we face today.

What can we do to stop the 2004 report from the International Funding Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank advocating the privatisation of CWA becoming reality? A string of high-profile disasters in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has shaken the consensus that private companies are better than public ones at providing water and sewerage. Even the World Bank has acknowledged that privatisation may not always be the instrument of choice in providing basic services to the poor and needy; its President of sustainable development, Ian Johnson, recently said: ?We are not religious zealots when it comes to privatisation.? In Mauritius, a committee presided by the minister for Public utilities will soon present a report to the cabinet based on the IFC findings and we may soon be embarking on a reckless privatisation course despite all the negative evidence from various parts of the world.

Before the government even considers a privatisation scheme, it ought to look at some practical ways to meet the increasing demand for water by planning coherently for the future, and by making a more intelligent use of existing resources. Here are some examples that demand only will power and people with sufficient étoffe to bring to fruition:

1. According to the ministry of Public utilities, the Midlands Dam water level has up until recently never gone below 60% of full capacity, which means that an expensive but much needed resource has never been fully exploited. It contains 25 million cubic metres of water when full and only 10 million cubic metres have ever been used. Surely, someone with half a brain at the CWA can extend his intellectual resources sufficiently to find a way to divert some of the underused capacity to regions that perennially suffer from water shortages. Only 20% of that water (5 million cubic metres) could be transferred to the treatment plants at Mont-Blanc and Riviere-du-Poste in order to meet the demand in the South, South East, and South West of the country. It should cost roughly Rs 500 millions to lay the pipes for this venture and again I cannot help thinking that that figure is equivalent to the amount lost by the limousines for the SIDS conference and is less than is wasted every year on missions. Anyone with an ?O? level in Physics (and I haven?t) would know that the effects of gravity mean that no expensive pumps would be required to make the water flow from the high altitude Midlands dam to the south. This would still leave the Midlands dam with the 40% of its full capacity (equivalent to 10 million cubic metres, or twice the full capacity of La Nicolière reservoir) that has never been used.

2. I fully accept that it takes a long time for feasibility studies, etc to take place before a big project is undertaken and completed. But it should not take an eternity to understand the basic concept that we are running out of water and that we need to build more dams to increase our water capacity. We have been talking about the Bagatelle Dam for nearly ten years and as yet not one hole has been dug.

3. There is no reason why the vast amounts of water that are allowed to flow freely and so wastefully to the sea from the Rivière-du-Poste and Chamarel rivers cannot be saved for human consumption and for agriculture. A dam on each river would cost approximately Rs 2 billions.

4. We are close to entering the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest incidence of diabetes; and yet the CWA scandalously charges our soft drinks companies a fraction of the water costs that it charges household customers. Private boreholes deplete our underground water resources and their owners pay a pittance for that luxury.

5. The European Investment Bank allocated Rs 1.2 billion two years ago to deal with the shocking loss of 45 % of our water capacity through broken pipes and fraud. Nothing has been done so far and those in charge of our most important public utility appear mesmerized by the size of the task.

Can Harry Boolauck, the newly appointed General Manager of the CWA, do what the previous incumbents have lamentably failed to achieve? Only time will tell. But in order to be successful, he needs to have the right people around him, people with sound technical expertise, a low sycophancy factor, and a proven track record of successful project implementation to blend creatively with his management style.

The illusion of abundance of water in a green and fertile land does not need the one-size-fits-all pseudo solution that privatisation claims to provide. What is needed is proper management of a natural resource that has hitherto been treated in a cavalier and irresponsible manner. Jejune responses to such a serious problem are against the national interest.

R.A.J.