Overcoming politically induced resistance to payment for water in South Africa's urban areas

The difficulties faced by South Africa in achieving reasonable levels of payment for water supplied in urban areas are in many respects similar to those applicable throughout the world. In some respects, however, the problems are very different. Decades of having to endure apolitically offensive system has created negative attitudes in the bulk of the population towards authority, and indeed towards service providers. These attitudes will not easily change. As the majority of people had no real involvement in governance in the evolving political system during the nineteen eighties they increasingly regarded all authority as illegitimate. An illegitimate system quite naturally hadto be resisted and replaced. The objective of resistance was to makethe country ungovernable and hence open to change. By withholding, initially, housing rental repayments to the State and, later, servicespayments to local authorities, a powerful weapon was brought into play. But with it came many other attitude changes, currently referred to as a 'culture of non-payment', which the new democratic governmentis now forced to grapple with. The degree to which the levels of payment for water services can be improved to acceptable levels will be dependent in a general sense upon government's success in changing attitudes and, in particular, on water authorities' persuasiveness in inducing customers to take responsibility for paying for services rendered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]