Con­vert­ing the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty in­to an ef­fec­tive and ef­fi­cient vi­tal util­i­ty in the in­ter­est of con­sumers, who pay wa­ter rates and whose tax re­turns have fed the un­quench­able thirst of the au­thor­i­ty for an­nu­al hun­dreds of mil­lions in cash in­jec­tions, should be a ma­jor elec­tion is­sue.

Every gov­ern­ment, and every min­is­ter over the last 50 years has failed to de­liv­er on promis­es about “Wa­ter for All”. Such min­is­ters, boards of di­rec­tors, and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cers have been shift­ed here and there out of the fir­ing line with­out re­sult­ing in pos­i­tive change. One such min­is­ter, Robert Le Hunte, was ei­ther fired di­rect­ly or giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­sign.

The al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion at all lev­els of the au­thor­i­ty, in­com­pe­tence by di­rec­tors, ex­ec­u­tives, and se­nior man­agers, and the use of the util­i­ty’s pay­roll to give jobs to po­lit­i­cal par­ty op­er­a­tives are leg­ends at WASA.

For­eign ex­per­tise has been sought, for in­stance, the British com­pa­ny Sev­ern Trent was giv­en a man­age­ment con­tract with the au­thor­i­ty, so too an ad­vi­so­ry team from the wa­ter util­i­ty of Ugan­da and con­sul­tants and con­sul­ta­tions spread far and wide, have all soaked up bil­lions of dol­lars with­out un­block­ing the flow of wa­ter.

It has been stat­ed by suc­ceed­ing en­gi­neers and of­fi­cials of the au­thor­i­ty, that a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of WASA's un­der­ground pipeline has been blocked. Dis­plays of such lines stuffed al­most to clo­sure with silt etc, have been sta­ble fea­tures at the au­thor­i­ty's head­quar­ters in St Joseph.

In ad­di­tion to the mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar sub­si­dies spent by the Gov­ern­ment, the at­tempts to fix vi­able rates and have users meet the true cost of wa­ter pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion have not been achieved.

What cus­tomers of WASA are sure of, es­pe­cial­ly those at the ex­trem­i­ties of the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem is the re­al­i­ty of a one-day-a-week ser­vice and in cer­tain dis­tricts, or weeks, even months with­out tap wa­ter.

While the is­sue of fix­ing WASA has been ar­tic­u­lat­ed on po­lit­i­cal plat­forms in a gen­er­alised way, the par­ties have not made it a crit­i­cal is­sue. Maybe it’s be­cause the ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties, aware of their in­abil­i­ty to bring so­lu­tions to the prob­lems, have not seen it as an is­sue they can pur­sue be­cause of their fail­ings.

Dur­ing the pri­va­tions of last week, the un­kept promis­es made by the min­is­ter, the CEO, and his se­nior tech­ni­cal staff to 250,000 con­sumers were not achieved on time and in qual­i­ty. The truth must cer­tain­ly be that such promis­es were not re­al­is­tic.

There should be a stud­ied and well-planned ef­fort by the elec­torate and the me­dia to de­mand cam­paign­ing politi­cians and their par­ties, a time­line to bring per­ma­nent so­lu­tions to the well-known in­ef­fec­tive­ness of WASA.

It’s the kind of one-is­sue can­di­da­ture which can make a dif­fer­ence to the qual­i­ty func­tion­ing of this vi­tal util­i­ty. The vot­er must make it a per­son­al cru­sade to achieve needs in lo­cal gov­ern­ment.

The un­var­nished truth, with­out at­tempt­ing to save the face of the en­tire coun­try as a vi­able and able na­tion, is to recog­nise that suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments, the man­agers of this pub­lic util­i­ty, and all of us as con­sumers, have failed this par­tic­u­lar jour­ney to na­tion­al in­de­pen­dence.