I live in quite a rural area in the central of Kenya, in a town called Nyahururu. A few days ago, I was having a conversation with my landlord on water. We had some issues with water supply and to solve that he reached out to the local public water service provider and the experience was awful. After several calls, he had to go physically to the office to ‘practically beg’ them to come and connect our two homes to water despite the service pipes passing just along past our gate. He mentioned how the public institutions providing services and utilities like water and power, especially in Kenya offer awful services. He went on to describe how the customer service of the water provider is poor, how workers , just choose not to do the work they are paid for and when you need their services you must bribe them to do the same work they are paid to do, and if you don’t bribe them, then they will not help you out. He went ahead to discuss how these government providers enjoy monopolies, offer shoddy services but there is nothing you can do but beg them to continue offering the services even if they are below the guaranteed quality.
He said he wished that these services are provided by the private sector. Infact, he said that water and power supply should be privatized. He gave an example of Safaricom, a Telecommunication private company in Kenya. He described how this giant company has been able to connect most places in Kenya, even those in marginalized areas. For a moment I was conflicted. I am a big believer that some services like water, healthcare, and education should not be privatised. But at the same time, I understood his frustrations.
My landlord’s experience and frustration are nothing new to Kenyans. We have experienced first-hand what a poorly managed public sector looks like. From poor management where leadership is based less on competence and more on political connections, to economy of ‘kitu kidogo (little something in Swahili, our nickname for bribes)’ where you must pay someone to offer you services that they are actually paid to deliver. But it can also be lack of motivation, accountability, or any drive to improve how service delivery is done. These are not small problems, and I do not think defending public services means pretending that they do not exist.
My biggest question is, is privatisation the answer to public sector problems? This reminded me a piece that my colleague and friend Harry Bignell wrote about what happens when essential public services such as water, health and care become privatized. Her examples are a useful reminder that private ownership does not automatically solve the problems of public provision, it can actually sometimes introduce other sets of problems, particularly when the pressure to generate profits and shareholders’ benefits begins to compete with the need to provide a good service.
The case of privatisation has been based on two principles. One, that the private sector will provide services more efficiently. This is the principle that my landlord was leaning into when he was citing Safaricom. It is built on the backbone of that they have incentives to offer better services more efficiently to people because they are chasing profits. Which makes some sense, but equally the chasing of profits can lead to lots of cutting corners, which we have seen in the UK with the large-scale pollution of rivers by privatised water companies and failure to fix leaks in the system. The second principle is that privatisation will provide the much-needed fiscal relief for the government in two ways. One, through the proceeds of privatisation which involve selling public assets and second, because the government will not have to fund that sector which has been privatised. This second principle made privatisation quite popular with governments which are financially constrained around the world. In fact, though this is often a false economy, as governments still need to subsidise private providers, and pick up the pieces when they fail. As the World Bank notes, privatisation is not a remedy to weak institutions and lack of regulations. Private monopolies can also replace public ones and the public end up losing control over essential services and end up with poor service provision, higher costs, and poor quality.
This is where my own discomfort with privatising water comes from. Private companies must think about markets, profits and returns. Which can be a good thing in some sectors. But for essential services provision, these can create a conflict over who is served. They will invest in and prioritize sections and markets that are profitable and neglect others especially when these low paying markets need infrastructure investments. The public sector, on the other hand, if well delivered, is built on the principle of delivering quality services to everyone without excluding people based on their ability to pay. It is supposed to provide services because people need them, not necessarily because they are profitable.
Water and health make the conversation about privatisation quite complicated because these are things that you cannot choose to go without. You can choose to move from one telecommunication provider to another, but you cannot simply decide that you do not want water because the price is too high. When privatised, these essential services risk being treated more like products than basic rights while citizens who are entitled to those rights become mere customers.
I do not mean that public sector should be defended at all costs. I understand there is a small comfort that can come with telling someone water should be publicly owned when the public provider is irresponsible and unaccountable and needs to be chased, begged and bribed to do their work. Public ownership should come with public accountability, and when it fails to do so it becomes an injustice. If anything, the frustration I felt listening to my landlord has made me more convinced that the argument for public services must be an argument for public services that actually work.
End.
Author: Simon Maina is the EQUALS Podcast & Blog Project Manager and the producer of EQUALS and Sick Development podcasts.
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