ABSTRACT
With neolibrealism triumphant, the international financial institutions (IFIs), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) formula for structural adjustment in Africa has followed the same recipe for the past 25 years: reduce public expenditures and increase revenues; deregulate and privatize public services. The new frontier in this drive towards privatization and commodification is the basic services sector: water, electricity, education and health care. Full cost-recovery through the elimination of subsidies in these sectors and investments by the private sector has become the prevailing logic. The IFIs argue that privatization and full cost-recovery will improve the economic efficiency of basic services delivery. In the water sector specifically, the case for privatization is built on the view that the private sector is more efficient and cost-effective as the provider of this service. With privatization of water services now an essential part of the IFIs loan conditionalities, most African countries have been forced into auctioning off their water utilities to the highest-bidding multinational corporations. In response, local and continentwide social movements and civil society groups like the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee and the Anti-Privatization Forum in South Africa and the Ghana National Coalition Against Privatization of Water have mobilized in a groundswell of waterrelated activism to resist and oppose the neoliberal policies of their governments and the IFIs. This has reinforced the critical importance of mobilizing and organizing at the level of local communities and linking them them up to continental and global struggles.
