Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa

Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 34, Number 4, December 2008
Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability,

and Techno-Politics in South Africa*
Antina von Schnitzler
(Columbia University)
Since the first general elections in 1994, the post-apartheid state has been faced by
widespread non-payment of service charges in townships, often interpreted as a ‘culture of
non-payment’ held to stem from the anti-apartheid rent boycotts of the 1980s. After the
spectacular failure of a campaign to encourage payment for services, and in a context of
neoliberal reforms prescribing ‘cost recovery’, many municipalities resorted to the large-
scale deployment of prepaid meters, devices that self-disconnect households following
non-payment. This article focuses on Operation Gcin’amanzi (Zulu for ‘Save Water’), a
controversial large-scale project initiated by the recently corporatised utility, Johannesburg
Water, to install prepaid water meters in all Soweto households. Taking this project and the
protests against it as a point of departure, I trace the history of prepayment technology in
South Africa from its initial development as a depoliticising device in the context of the rent
boycotts, to its present deployment in the context of ‘cost recovery’ and neoliberal reforms.
While the origins of the meter remain inscribed in the technology, in the post-apartheid
period the prepaid meter has been re-rationalised as a pedagogical device ‘aiding’ residents
to calculate and economise their water consumption. This entailed creation of what Michel
Callon has called ‘spaces of calculability’, forcing especially poor Soweto residents to
subject their daily consumption practices to a constant metrological scrutiny. I conclude
by suggesting that the history of prepayment is indicative of the larger problematic of
citizenship in a context of post-apartheid neoliberal reforms. Inclusion in and connection to
the state here becomes contingent upon the successful performance of an ethic that fuses civic
duty and entrepreneurial comportment. Simultaneously, the aspiration to bring into being
calculative citizens, licenses the recourse to illiberal political techniques.
Introduction
In November 2004, hundreds of protesters made their way from Mary Fitzgerald Square, near
the centre of Johannesburg, to the Civic Centre in Braamfontein. The protest was directed
against the increasing installation of prepaid meters in townships around Johannesburg. More
specifically, the demonstration targeted Operation Gcin’amanzi (Zulu for ‘Save Water’),
a controversial project embarked on by the recently corporatised utility Johannesburg Water,
to install prepaid water meters in all Soweto households. Like many protests in Soweto and
Johannesburg that preceded it, the demonstration took the prepaid meter as its main object of
contention. Many of the protesters had brought meters with them, carrying them in their
*This article is based on my doctoral research, which was made possible by a grant from the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research. I would like to thank the many people who gave their time for interviews
and conversations. I am also grateful to Jabu Molobela and Molefi Ndlovu who assisted me at different stages in this
research. Mireille Abelin, Franco Barchiesi, Thushara Hewage, Paul Kockelman, Mahmood Mamdani, Timothy
Mitchell, Poornima Paidipaty, Suren Pillay and David Scott read drafts at various stages and gave helpful feedback.
I would also like to thank Joost Fontein and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/08/040899-19
q 2008 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070802456821
900 Journal of Southern African Studies
hands and on their heads. Having made their way up to the Civic Centre, the prepaid meters
were heaped on the steps in front of the city council, and chanting could be heard echoing
against the concrete of the administrative building. Asked why he was participating in the
protest, one protester from Soweto suggested: ‘Everything is now prepaid. We prepay for
electricity, prepay for the phone, and now we prepay for water too, who knows tomorrow
we’ll have to prepay for the sun to be switched on and off.’ In its hyperbole, the protester’s
statement captured the key grievances that had led him here. On the one hand, it expressed the
sense of the increasing enclosure of basic necessities, the sun being perhaps the last imaginary
frontier after water; on the other hand, it also indicated how the ubiquity of prepayment
technology had reshaped Soweto residents’ daily lives.
One of the first and largest urban water prepayment projects in South Africa, Operation
Gcin’amanzi has become exceptionally visible due to the protests it provoked. Nevertheless,
it does follow a larger trend (more often for electricity but increasingly also for water)
towards the use of prepayment technology as the main form of connecting township residents
to infrastructure. Studies suggest that more than five million South African households were
fitted with prepaid meters in the ten years following the end of apartheid. The scale of the
deployment of prepaid meters in South Africa is globally unprecedented: it is estimated that
of the eight million one-way prepaid meters deployed globally, six million are located in
South Africa.1 Simultaneously, South Africa has become a leader in the development of
prepayment technology, exporting meters and expertise to the rest of the continent and,
increasingly, to other places in the global South.
In the following, I take Operation Gcin’amanzi, and the protests it spawned, as a starting
point to explore what the ubiquity of prepayment technology in South Africa may suggest
about citizenship in the aftermath of apartheid, and in a context of neoliberal reforms. While
prepaid meters are often presented as efficient, administrative tools to facilitate service
provision, I will suggest that infrastructures, and the technologies deployed within them, are
invested with and productive of social and political relations. Rather than neutral means to
more substantive ends, I suggest that prepaid meters are inscribed with political histories and
have become central to the reformulation of political subjectivities. Taking the visibility the
meters gained in the context of Operation Gcin’amanzi as a starting point, I suggest that a
close analysis of prepayment technology enables a critical purchase on the materiality of the
civil link between citizens and the state. More generally, the history and increasing
predominance of prepayment technology in South Africa indicates how neoliberalism as a
‘global form’, while defined by a global reach and logic, is always already integrated in and
defined by particular contexts, and thus actualised only in heterogeneous assemblages.2
Neoliberalism and Citizenship

Operation Gcin’amanzi, and the protests that surrounded it, crystallised long-standing
debates and struggles over the commodification of water in South Africa and elsewhere.3
1 J.S. Jones, ‘Prepayment Reaches 21’, Metering International, 4, 1 (January 2007), pp. 80–1. Prepaid meters are
used in many other places, most notably for lower-income users in the UK, though on an exceptional rather than
generalised basis. Prepaid water meters were outlawed in the UK in 1998 on the grounds of health considerations.
2 S. Collier and A. Ong, ‘Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems,’ in S. Collier and A. Ong (eds), Global
Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2005),
pp. 3– 21.
3 Opposition to prepaid meters has taken many forms, including visible protests, the more invisible bridging of
meters, and more recently a constitutional challenge against the installation of prepaid water meters in Soweto.
The post-apartheid period has also seen the emergence of a range of social movements against privatisation. See
here, for example, A. Desai, We are the Poors: Community Struggles in the New South Africa (New York,
Monthly Review Press, 2002) and P. Naidoo and A. Veriava, ‘Re-membering Movements: Trade Unions and
Citizenship Prepaid 901
Recent scholarship has analysed the privatisation of water provision as a renewed cycle of
‘primitive accumulation’ and as an instance of what David Harvey terms ‘accumulation by
dispossession’.4 Prepaid water meters can here be seen as the capillary ends of ‘cost recovery’
that turns basic needs into new spheres of accumulation.5 While these analyses are central to
the concerns of this article, I will focus more specifically on how Operation Gcin’amanzi
produced and re-shaped ‘technologies of citizenship’ at what the Comaroffs have described
as the contradictory juncture of political liberation and economic liberalisation.6 Given that
water, unlike other basic services, is not substitutable, and is thus essential to survival,
debates about water privatisation have often highlighted the political and ethical questions at
the heart of neoliberal reforms with particular clarity.7
Many analyses of neoliberalism have expressed concern about the ways in which
privatisation impoverishes prior social democratic conceptions and practices of citizenship.8
Partly in response to the common view that neoliberalism is primarily an exclusionary
regime, another body of literature inspired by Foucault has analysed neoliberalism as a new
form of rationalising the ‘arts of government’. Rather than merely destructive of prior
formations of citizenship, here neoliberal reforms are seen to hinge on the construction of
particular forms of agency and, indeed, to work through the promotion of new conceptions
and practices of citizenship.9 Most centrally, neoliberal reforms entail the extension of a
calculative rationality to spheres previously considered subject to non-economic, social
logics. This does not entail the decline of notions of ‘civic virtue’, but rather their re-
signification. The aim, as Thomas Lemke points out, is to achieve ‘congruence . . . between a
responsible and moral individual and an economic rational individual’.10 ‘The social’ and life
itself, are to be recoded as objects of economic calculation. While ‘the market’, as an ideal,
structures neoliberal rationalities, I argue that the translation of neoliberal rationalities into
particular contexts often entails a recourse to techniques associated with more coercive,
illiberal regimes. As has been shown by a large body of work, the rise of liberalism coexisted
with and was founded upon disciplinary, ‘despotic’ forms of governing closely tied to
pedagogical imperatives. This was particularly evident in the colonial context, but also
extended into the postcolonial period, and it defined the rise of liberalism in the metropole.11
Footnote 3 continued
New Social Movements in Neoliberal South Africa’, in From Local Processes to Global Forces (Durban, Centre
for Civil Society, 2005).
4 See D. Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York, Oxford University Press, 2003) and M. De Angelis, ‘Marx and
Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s “Enclosures”’, The Commoner, 2 (September
2001). For a discussion in relation to South Africa see A. Veriava, ‘Unlocking the Present? Two Theories of
Primitive Accumulation’, in P. Bond, H. Chitonge and A. Hopfmann, The Accumulation of Capital in Southern
Africa (Johannesburg, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2007), pp. 46–62.
5 On cost recovery, see D. McDonald and J. Pape (eds), Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery in South
Africa (Cape Town and London, HSRC Press/Zed, 2002).
6 J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC, Duke University
Press, 2001). For a theoretical elaboration of ‘technologies of citizenship’, see B. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower:
Democratic Citizens and other Subjects (Ithaca, NY and London, Cornell University Press, 1999).
7 On water privatisation in Southern Africa see D. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds), The Age of the Commodity:
Water Privatization in Southern Africa (London, Earthscan, 2005) and P. Bond, Unsustainable South Africa:
Environment, Development, and Social Protest (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 2002). On such
debates in the UK, see K. Bakker, An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatizing Water in England and Wales
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).
8 See for example, P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York, The New Press,
1998).
9 M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
10 T. Lemke, ‘“The Birth of Bio-Politics”: Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal
Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30, 2 (May, 2000), pp. 190–207.
11 See M. Valverde, ‘“Despotism” and Ethical Liberal Governance’, in Economy and Society, 25, 3 (1996), pp. 357–
72. On liberalism as a project of reform in the context of slave emancipation, see D. Scott, ‘The Government of
Pedagogies of ‘improvement’ and their link with ‘despotic’ forms of government are thus not
exceptional, but intrinsic to liberal modes of rule.
In neoliberal thought, given its emergence in a context of a profound crisis of liberalism,
the importance of such devices and techniques was often rendered quite explicit. While
‘rational economic man’ was the ideal on which the social order was to rest, this subjectivity
was no longer assumed to be a given. For Friedrich Hayek, one of the most influential
neoliberal thinkers, homo economicus was no more than ‘a celebrated figment’ he associated
with the ‘rationalist tradition’.12 Hayek contended that the ‘free society’ could only function
with the help of ‘certain institutional arrangements [that] would induce man to use his
intelligence to the best effect’ and ‘it was only through the force of circumstances that he
could be made to behave economically or would learn carefully to adjust his means to his
ends’.13 This ‘discipline of freedom’,14 as he called it elsewhere, would be vital for a
functional neoliberal order.
The extension of such economic rationalities to new spheres thus necessitated the
introduction of a range of devices and capacities that would equip citizens with the ability
to calculate and engage in cost/benefit analysis. As Michel Callon has more recently
argued, processes of ‘marketisation’ are premised on the production of ‘spaces of
calculability’, that is, on the constitution of an environment that enables and encourages the
capacity for economic calculation. The crucial point, Callon suggests, ‘is not that of the
intrinsic competencies of the agent, but that of the equipment and devices . . . which give
his or her action a shape’.15 Calculative agency thus needs to be actively produced through
particular devices, including most centrally tools of measurement. Processes of
privatisation, then, are not merely the transfer of previously public services to ‘the
market’, but are premised on the configuration of economic actors and their equipment with
specific devices and capacities. Such processes are never smooth operations, but often entail
the introduction of disciplinary techniques and the concomitant reformulation of prior
conceptions and practices of citizenship. The prepaid meter, I seek to suggest below, is thus
central not only to making water calculable, but, more fundamentally, to creating a
calculative rationality.
By adopting this perspective, this article also takes the prepaid meter as indicative of a
larger transformation of the political terrain, one that rests ambivalently between late
apartheid and the fruition of neoliberal reforms in the post-apartheid period. In particular,
I intend to show how the use and rationalisation of the prepaid meter gradually shifted from
being a political tool deployed to depoliticise the anti-apartheid rent boycotts of the 1980s, to
being conceived as a technique to produce ‘calculative citizens’ post-apartheid. While, in
both instances, the prepaid meter acted as a political technology, the remainder of this article
will explore how the rationalities and mechanisms through which it was operationalised were
reconfigured over time. Here, neoliberalism emerges not as a ready-made programme, but as
dependent and parasitic upon prior historical contexts and techniques.
Freedom’, in D. Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1999), pp. 70–90. See also U. Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in 19th Century British
Thought (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999).
12 F. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 66.
13 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 61.
14 F. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1981 [1979]), p. 163. In a similar way, Milton Friedman suggested that while ‘troublesome to a
liberal’, ‘paternalism is inescapable for those whom we designate as not responsible’. M. Friedman, Capitalism
and Freedom (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 33–4.
15 M. Callon, ‘Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics’, in M. Callon (ed.), The Laws
of the Markets (London, Blackwell, 1998), p. 21. See also T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics,
Modernity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002).
Operation Gcin’amanzi
In the context of Igoli 2002, the neoliberal restructuring plan for the city of Johannesburg
promulgated in the late 1990s,16 Johannesburg Water Pty (Ltd.) was created as an
independent company with the City as sole share-holder, and a management contract was
awarded to a consortium led by the France-based, multinational Suez Group. It was argued
that this process, known as corporatisation, would create efficiency and that Suez was to play
a central role in introducing business practices into the process of water management and
provision. Shortly after its establishment, in 2003, Johannesburg Water embarked on a five-
year project to replace derelict infrastructure and install prepaid water meters in all Soweto
households. Named Operation Gcin’amanzi (Zulu for ‘Save Water’), the aim of the project is
to curb the massive water losses the utility identified in the township.17 In shiny brochures,
Johannesburg Water outlined that Soweto had a staggering 70 per cent ‘unaccounted for
water’, lost through leakages and through unmetered, apartheid era, connections.18
It calculated that once completed, the project would result in millions of Rands in savings.
In exchange for consenting to the installation of a prepaid meter, residents’ debts would be
written off over a period of three years, provided they had not tampered with the meter.
The meter would automatically dispense the nationally mandated free basic water amount of
6,000 litres a month per household, following which residents would have to purchase water
credits from the local utility offices using a magnetic chip key.19
In the beginning, the pilot project of Operation Gcin’amanzi in Phiri, the first area of
Soweto to be affected, met with massive resistance, soon dubbed ‘Operation Vul’amanzi’
(Zulu for ‘Let the Water Flow’). The Phiri Concerned Residents’ Forum, an affiliate of the
Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) formed in this context, organised protests and dug out pipes
laid for the project at night. The demonstrations were countered by repressive police action
and the establishment of a permanent private security presence at the installation sites. During
the protests and media debates that surrounded the beginnings of Operation Gcin’amanzi, the
prepaid meter was a central point of contention, prompting angry exchanges between APF
activists and the unions on the one hand and, on the other, the utility, the City and even, at one
stage, the Minister for Water Affairs and Forestry. Activists, both in the unions and the APF,
16 While more recent city policies, such as indigent policies and social development packages, have stepped away
from the more openly neoliberal documents like Igoli 2002 and Johannesburg 2030, the corporatisation of
Johannesburg Water and the subsequent promulgation of Operation Gcin’amanzi have to be seen as part of this
earlier paradigm. On the shifts in neoliberal and development discourses see G. Hart, ‘Post-Apartheid
Developments in Historical and Comparative Perspective’, in V. Padayachee (ed.), The Development Decade?
Economic and Social Change in South Africa, 1994–2004 (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2006). For a detailed
history of iGoli 2002 and the policy debates in Johannesburg in the late 1990s, see J. Beall, O. Crankshaw and
S. Parnell, Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg (London, Earthscan,
1999). For a closer examination of the creation of Johannesburg Water see L. Smith, Neither Public Nor Private:
Unpacking the Johannesburg Water Corporatization Model (Geneva, UNRISD, 2006).
17 Johannesburg Water was corporatised in 2001 and up until 2006 had a management contract with a consortium of
water corporations with the largest share held by the France-based multinational Suez Group.
18 During apartheid, most households were unmetered and charged a flat rate for an estimated consumption of 20 kl
of water per month. According to calculations by the utility, the actual consumption figure is estimated at 55 kl,
lost in large part through leakages. After the trial phase of Operation Gcin’amanzi in Phiri, that figure is reported
to have dropped to 10–14 kl.
19 The Free Basic Water (FBW) policy came into effect in 2001. The amount of 6,000 litres is calculated to provide
25 litres per person per day based on a household size of eight people. While the FBW policy was introduced in
part to satisfy the constitutional right to access to services, as Alex Loftus argues, it simultaneously cleared the
grounds for the introduction of harsher cost recovery mechanisms including prepaid water meters. See A. Loftus,
‘“Free Water” as a Commodity: The Paradoxes of Durban’s Water Service Transformation’, in McDonald and
Ruiters (eds), The Age of the Commodity, pp. 189– 203. The category ‘household’ de facto implied a stand. Given
the legacy of apartheid urban policy, many stands include more than one household, often with several families
living in backyard shacks on each stand. This way of mapping the townships implies that a ‘household’ may
include anything from one to over 20 residents, and thus often exceeds the FBW calculation.
argued that the installation of prepaid meters was a direct result of the commodification of
water supply and a harsh enforcement of ‘cost recovery’ resulting from corporatisation and
the hiring of the Suez-led consortium, that would entail disconnections from water supply and
thus lead to health concerns, especially given the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the area.20 They
also pointed out that prepaid meters were only being installed in the townships, rather than in
the wealthy, predominantly white, northern suburbs where water usage per person was
higher, given amenities such as pools and the irrigation of large gardens. Many Phiri residents
also felt alienated by the lack of consultation in both the planning and implementation of
Operation Gcin’amanzi.
The protests significantly delayed the project’s schedule. In response, the utility
intensified its ‘social intervention’ campaign. Large billboards along major arteries in Soweto
read ‘Save Water!’, or ‘Soweto Leaks!’. Minibus taxis sporting the slogans could be seen
driving around the townships. Graffiti-style murals commissioned by Johannesburg Water
sought to explain to residents how to use their water ‘wisely’, by graphically detailing how
much water could be used daily for cooking, washing and cleaning to remain within the free
basic water amount. Large trucks carrying 30 mock 200-litre barrels physically demonstrated
to residents how much free water they would be getting each month. The prepaid meter was
re-named ‘free-pay meter’ to emphasise that the meters were not punitive devices, but rather
that they would allow for the 6,000 litres of free basic water to be dispensed every month.
An educational programme called ‘Tappie Roadshow’ taught school children about the
scarcity of water and how to save water. Johannesburg Water also started training contingents
of local residents as door-to-door consultants who would collect the signatures that
constituted a prerequisite for the project to proceed. While the gathering of consent suggested
a measure of choice, residents were not given the option of having a conventional meter
installed. Furthermore, failure to sign the consent form would result in more coercive
measures, notably the downgrading of residents’ service level in the form of an installation of
a standpipe in the yard, what is known as ‘Level of Service 2’ in the City’s categorisation.
As the project proceeded, the protests weakened and many officials, for a while at least, were
hailing Operation Gcin’amanzi as the future in infrastructure technology and management.21
As suggested by the Soweto resident quoted above, many township residents experience
much of the infrastructure only as a potential. Electricity, and now water, is for many people
in Soweto subject to continuous refilling of credit, and hence to the availability of funds.22
Prepayment also structures daily life according to a particular temporality and logic, as will
become clearer below. To be sure, prepaid meters are not in all cases experienced as negative.
20 This concern has more recently been confirmed by a survey which found that in areas where pre-paid water
meters had been installed hygiene practices were significantly lower than in areas still under the previous regime
of deemed consumption billing. See F. Haffajee, M. Chopra and D. Sanders, The Problem of Handwashing and
Paying for Water in South Africa (Municipal Services Project, Occasional Papers Series No. 13, March 2007); see
also, Coalition Against Water Privatization and Anti-Privatisation Forum, The Struggle Against Silent
Disconnections: Prepaid Meters and the Struggle for Life in Soweto (Johannesburg, 2005), available at http://
www.citizen.org/documents/phiri/pdf, last accessed 10 April 2008.
21 ‘High Praise for Operation Gcin’amanzi’, Johannesburg Water, Press Release, 31 October, 2005, http://www.
johannesburgwater.co.za, last accessed 10 April 2006. This enthusiasm for Operation Gcin’amanzi has recently
been severely diminished. After the research and writing for this article was completed, the Johannesburg High
Court, in an unprecedented judgement, ruled the forcible installation of prepaid water meters in Phiri
unconstitutional and ordered the City to increase the free basic water provision from 25 to 50 litres per person per
day. The legal challenge was launched by five Phiri residents with the support of the Coalition Against Water
Privatization, the Freedom of Expression Institute and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of
the Witwatersrand. For now, however, the meters remain in place and the City is set to appeal the judgement in
the Supreme Court of Appeals. For details on the case, see http://www.law.wits.ac.za/cals/phiri/index.htm, last
accessed 10 May 2008
22 M. Nefale, A Survey on Attitudes Towards Prepaid Electricity Meters in Soweto (Centre for Applied Legal
Studies, University of the Witwaterstrand, Johannesburg, 2004).
Given the debts many residents have accumulated over years of not paying service charges
(what the City terms ‘bad debt’, i.e. debt residents could never repay), prepaid meters are
often viewed as devices that enable residents to move out of such debt relations, since
acceptance of a prepaid meter is in many cases tied to the conditional writing off of debt.
Similarly, many residents mistrust the City’s accounting practices and often inaccurate
bills.23 At the same time, bridging of prepaid electricity and water meters is widespread, and
policing presents a massive challenge, forcing utilities to deploy ever more secure meter
technologies on a regular basis, which has also led to the development of a lucrative market
for prepaid meter production and innovation.
Reforming the Non-Paying Citizen

While Johannesburg Water framed the project in an environmental discourse of water
conservation that, coupled with nationalist exhortations of water as a scarce national asset,24
resonated with an increasingly global environmental discourse of ‘sustainability’, this framing
of the problem elided the more complicated calculations and targets of the project. Given
Johannesburg Water, as a newly corporatised utility, was tasked with ‘balancing the books’, the
most immediate motivation to embark on the project was that 70 per cent of the water it was
buying from the bulk provider Rand Water, and reticulating to Soweto, was ‘disappearing’ every
month (what is called ‘unaccounted for water’ in utility parlance), implying millions of Rands in
losses for the utility. This ‘unaccounted for water’ was further subdivided into ‘physical and
commercial losses’, the former referring to leaks in reticulation pipes, and the latter to any losses
not traceable as technical – for the most part losses incurred through the unmetered, apartheid-
era connections or through domestic plumbing leakages. Given the absence of metering in
Soweto, however, distinguishing the two was not an easy task. It was unclear to officials
how much water was being lost in derelict apartheid era pipes, how much was lost on each
resident’s property and how much was ‘lost’, in monetary terms, due to the non-payment of
water accounts.
Indeed, a large advertisement for the project on Old Potchefstroom Road, one of the main
roads running through Soweto, showed a bucket of water heavily leaking through several holes,
next to the slogan ‘Soweto Leaks!’. The banner reproduced the problem from the utility’s point
of view: water was being lost in what appeared as an unmapped and unmappable mass of
technical malfunctioning and human unreliability – ‘wastage’, broken pipes, the (unpaid) flat
rate system, leaking domestic infrastructure. In this way, what were in fact two separate
problems – derelict apartheid-era infrastructure and the non-payment of accounts – were
merged into a generic problem of ‘unaccounted for water’ to be met by an equally generic quest
to ‘save water’. By extension, the two main interventions of the project – the upgrading or
repair of infrastructure and the installation of prepaid water meters – despite having
substantially different targets, were presented as inextricably connected.
23 See here, for example, H. Meintjes and C. White, ‘“Robbers and Freeloaders”: Relations Between Communities
and ESKOM in Gauteng Townships’, Policy: Issues and Actors, 10, 5 (June 1997), pp. 5–21. It should be noted,
however, that these positive effects usually mentioned by residents both presuppose a relationship of dependence
or of mistrust of the municipality that the prepaid meter is seen as ameliorating. The prepaid meter here figures as
a lesser of two evils.
24 Ironically, much of the water piped into Soweto is obtained from the Lesotho dams, constructed as part of the
controversial Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), embarked on during the apartheid era and continued
during the post-apartheid period. Discourses of water scarcity and of water as a ‘national asset’ thus gloss over
more complex questions. On the discursive production of ‘scarcity’ see E. Swyngedouw, Social Power and the
Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47. On the LHWP, see
P. Bond, Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development, and Social Protest (Pietermaritzburg,
University of Natal Press, 2002).
In conflating the two, the utility omitted the drastic consequences the introduction of
prepaid meters would have for residents. At the time the project started, estimates put the
figure of non-payment for services in Soweto at 87%, with roughly the same amount of
percentage of accounts in arrears. For the vast majority of residents, water was thus not only
unmetered, but also de facto free. The installation of prepaid meters, even with the provision
of a basic amount for free, entailed the enforced introduction of a new economy of water
consumption. More importantly, Johannesburg Water also elided the long history of struggles
around service provision and conflicts over payment that had culminated in the rent boycotts
of the 1980s, which will be discussed more fully below. By framing the project in this way,
Johannesburg Water thus turned the question of non-payment into a technical issue.25 ‘Saving
water’ came to stand in for, and erased, a host of political questions that had defined Sowetan
history at least since the 1980s.
The non-payment of services in many townships is not a new phenomenon. For years
there has been concern in urban planning and policy circles about what is widely referred to
as a ‘culture of non-payment’ in the townships, held to stem from the rent boycotts in the
1980s.26 Following the first general elections, the ANC-led government made the resumption
of payment one of its main priorities. From the outset, the imperative of paying for services
was couched in a moral language of ‘empowered’ and ‘active’ citizenship. The 1994 White
Paper on Water Supply and Sanitation Policy framed the problem in this way:
An insistence that disadvantaged people should pay for improved water services may seem harsh
but the evidence indicates that the worst possible approach is to regard poor people as having no
resources. This leads to people being treated as the objects rather than as the subjects of
development . . . A key element influencing a household’s willingness to pay for an improved
water supply is the households’ sense of entitlement . . . and their attitude toward Government
policy regarding water supply and sanitation. In general, communities are reluctant to involve
themselves in countries where the perception prevails that it is the Government’s responsibility to
provide services.27
In this framing of the problem, key terms of the critique of the development paradigm
were re-signified to rationalise ‘cost recovery’, most conspicuously in the way in which
agency is conflated with responsibility. Most noteworthy is the way in which non-payment
figured as both a cognitive and a behavioural problem. Concomitant with the widespread
notion of a ‘culture of non-payment’, here non-payment was seen to emerge out of a ‘sense of
entitlement’, a particular ‘attitude’. Having identified the problem in this way, government
efforts to encourage payment were couched in a moral-pedagogical language aimed at
reforming the culture of township residents, and, most centrally, at establishing a new
conception of civic virtue.28
25 The question of non-payment is not mentioned in JW’s official brochures or pamphlets. JW representatives
repeatedly denied that the question of non-payment is relevant to the project. Internally, however, it is often
emphasised that prepaid meters are aimed at creating an ‘acceptance of the user-pay principle’ See M. Rabe and
N. Singh, ‘Creating Efficiency using Prepayment as a Demand Side Management Tool’, Presentation at the South
African Prepayment Week, Cape Town, 19 May 2005.
26 While the ‘culture of non-payment’ argument described here is widespread, many activists and scholars argue
that poor residents are unable to pay for services, see McDonald and Pape (eds), Cost Recovery and the Crisis of
Service Delivery in South Africa. There is no space here to comment on the indigency policy launched by
Johannesburg City Council in May 2005. But importantly, it did include a debt write-off for residents categorised
as ‘indigent’, conditional upon the acceptance of a prepaid water meter.
27 Republic of South Africa, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Water Supply and Sanitation Policy White
Paper (Cape Town, November 1994), p. 7.
28 The shifting representations of poor township residents has been documented and analysed in J. Beall,
O. Crankshaw and S. Parnell, ‘Victims, Villains and Fixers: the Urban Environment and Johannesburg’s Poor’,
Journal of Southern African Studies [JSAS ], 26, 4 (December 2000), pp. 833 –55. See also I. Chipkin.
‘“Functional” and “Dysfunctional” Communities: The Making of National Citizens’, JSAS, 29, 1 (March 2003),
pp. 63–82. On the relationship between the commodification of water and the willingness to pay for water in
One of the most visible government programmes, the Masakhane Campaign (‘Let us build
together’) fused nation-building with a discourse of ‘responsible citizenship’, arguing that
national reconstruction was only possible if each individual citizen realised that while
liberation had provided them with rights, it had also imposed duties on them. As a local
Gauteng organiser for the campaign told me, Masakhane was aimed at remedying a
‘dependency syndrome’ stemming from the apartheid era, a diagnosis ironically reminiscent of
neoliberal characterisations of the welfare state: ‘Black people were not allowed to be creative,
they were used to waiting for others to do something for them. That’s why now, we need to be
creative. So we said let’s take every person in the country as an asset.’ He went on to emphasise
that the campaign was about teaching people how to ‘balance freedom and responsibility’.29
Following this logic, the Masakhane Campaign shifted the meaning of ‘people-driven
development’ from an emphasis on democratic participation to one stressing citizens’ fiscal
responsibility towards the nation. Similarly, ‘freedom’ now tended to be aligned with
individual autonomy and the ‘responsibilisation’ of behaviour. In this way, the Masakhane
Campaign signalled a larger shift within post-apartheid nationalist discourse. ‘The people’
now not only signalled the foundation of sovereignty, but also became a pedagogical object in
need of continuous reform.30 Central to this process was the constitution of citizens as fiscal
subjects overlaying the dominant rights-based discourse of the anti-apartheid movement,
allied to a quest to ‘normalise’ the fiscal relationship between the state and its citizens in the
aftermath of apartheid. The act of payment, and thus of recognizing one’s obligation to the
state, came to be seen as a prerequisite for inclusion within the new political community.31
The campaign was a spectacular failure. Non-payment rates remained at similar levels.
In Johannesburg, continued non-payment coupled with increasing fiscal crisis led to a drastic
turn of strategy. In 1997, the Gauteng head of the Masakhane Campaign concluded that
‘Persuasion hasn’t been taken seriously, so we are now at the stage of coercion, and it’s
paying dividends’.32 Initially, ‘coercion’ entailed embarking on large-scale service
disconnection drives.33 In the long run, however, such disconnections were seen as
unsustainable, especially as they had been subject to much protest, in particular from the
Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), a residents’ movement that emerged in this
context.34 Furthermore, given the constitutional provision of the right of access to basic
services, disconnections could potentially become subject to legal challenges.
It is in this context of the failure to ‘normalise’ the fiscal relationship in the aftermath of
apartheid, and the mounting realisation of the persistence of non-payment, that prepayment
technology became increasingly attractive to utilities and municipalities.35 This shift towards
prepayment technology, as a means of solving non-payment, simultaneously turned the
Cameroon, see B. Page, ‘Paying for Water and the Geography of Commodities’, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, 30 (2005), pp. 293–306.
29 Interview with former Gauteng Assistant Co-ordinator of Masakhane campaign, Midrand, 16 October 2004.
30 On the double meaning of ‘the people’, see G. Agamben, ‘What is a People?’, in G. Agamben, Means without
End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 2000), pp. 29–35.
31 See here also J. Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa
(Princeton, Princeton University, 2005).
32 Sicelo Shiceka, then Gauteng Local Government MEC and head of the provincial Masakhane Campaign, quoted
in SAPA press report, 13 August 1997.
33 Research carried out in 2001 showed that 61 per cent of Soweto households had experienced at least one
electricity cut-off during the past 12 months due to non-payment. See M. Fiil-Flynn, ‘The Electricity Crisis in
Soweto’, Occasional Paper Series no. 4, Queen’s University Municipal Services Project; G. Khunou, ‘‘Massive
Cut-offs’: Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Electricity in Diepkloof, Soweto’, in McDonald and Pape (eds), Cost
Recovery, pp. 61–77.
34 A. Egan and A. Wafer, ‘The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee’ (Durban, Centre for Civil Society, 2004).
35 It is often argued that prepaid meters are used primarily because they enable the extension of services to informal
and rural areas, where the establishment of accounts and billing is more difficult. While this is certainly one of the
political question of defining the parameters of rights and civic obligations into an
administrative question, and inscribed them within the technology itself. This use of
prepayment technology to forestall debates and to solve a political crisis, harkened back to the
first development of the technology in the context of the rent boycotts, a history I will briefly
outline in the next section.
The Prepaid Meter as a Political Technology

Historically, municipal services, and the relationship between state and citizen they construct,
were linked to the rise of ‘population’ as an administrative category of governance, distinct
from, yet mapping onto, the juridical subject of sovereignty.36 In a context of industrialisation
and rising labour mobilisation in late nineteenth-century Europe, ‘the social’ became both a
way of making such conflicts intelligible and a distinctive terrain open to intervention through
a multiplicity of programmes, mechanisms and techniques.37 In this context, municipal
infrastructure established a biopolitical relationship between state and population through
which the latter was rendered both measurable and regulatable. Water infrastructure, in
particular, was seen as vital not only to public health, but also to the creation of an
environment conducive to moral behaviour.38 Pipes, wires, roads and rails increasingly linked
up all citizens in what Graham and Marvin have called the ‘networked metropolis’.39
Simultaneously, the payment for insurance, taxes and services became an ethical obligation
tied to citizenship, and a means of distributing ‘risk’ throughout society. Unlike taxation or
insurance, however, paying for municipal services established an immediate fiscal relation
between the state and the individual household. The monthly or quarterly cycle of billing
expressed a mutual obligation and established a temporality based on trust – here, the
provision of services preceded payment. Inscribed in the technology of the credit meter was a
social contract which, whilst violable, entailed the assumption of a regularised flow of
provision and payment and a citizenry both willing and able to pay.
In the colonies, the history of the modern state followed a different trajectory.
As Chatterjee has argued, in the colonial state a biopolitical connection between the state
and its subjects preceded the connection of political representation – ‘population’ preceded
‘the people’ as a juridical subject.40 Colonial infrastructures became both a means to extract
resources and a form of biopolitics constituting colonial territories as unified, governable
spaces. As Prakash points out, the ‘operation of the colonial state became deeply enmeshed
in a network of technological apparatuses, institutions, and practices’.41 Unlike in Europe,
where infrastructure was tied to the rise of a regime of modern citizenship, infrastructure in
advantages from the point of view of extending access to services, it does not hold in formal urban townships such
as Soweto where accounts and domestic connections are already established.
36 On the rise of ‘population’, see M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977–1979 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
37 See J. Donzelot, ‘The Promotion of the Social’, Economy and Society, 17, 3 (1988).
38 P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, Verso, 2003); T. Osborne, ‘Security
and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the 19th Century’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds),
Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 99–122.
39 S. Graham and S. Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the
Urban Condition (London, New York, Routledge, 2003).
40 P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1993); and P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most
of the World (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003).
41 G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1999), p. 161.
the colonies was primarily linked to processes of extraction and a biopolitics closely bound
up with the project of colonial domination.
In South Africa, colonial and apartheid infrastructure projects were similarly organised
around the exigencies of security and extraction. Electricity provision during the early
twentieth century was limited to private generation and distribution for the mines, whilst
water and irrigation works were for the most part confined to large farms.42 Increasingly,
however, the usefulness of infrastructure in surveillance was recognised. Townships were
constructed in ways amenable to policing, whilst electricity was often first extended to them
in the form of tall light poles that enabled the surveillance of the townships at night. Water
and sewerage service was extended to urban locations in a concern for public hygiene,
signalling an increasing biopolitical concern in the context of urbanisation and rising labour
mobilisations. While the high apartheid period was characterised by the neglect of urban
infrastructures, concomitant with the ‘grand apartheid’ logic of giving the black population
‘representation’ in the Bantustans, in the post-1976 Soweto Uprising period, it became
increasingly clear that the fiction of urban residents as ‘temporary sojourners’ could no longer
be maintained. From the mid-1970s, amidst systemic crisis, struggles around urban
infrastructure became a serious concern for urban planners.
For much of the apartheid period then, infrastructure could be seen as the material
embodiment of the apartheid state’s varying strategies for governing the townships. In the
absence of political representation, infrastructure and the biopolitical connection to the
state it constructed became, for the vast majority of residents, their only link to the state.
In the urban areas, infrastructure both attested to the reluctant acknowledgement of their
presence and simultaneously signalled their disavowal and subjection. It is unsurprising
then that while the anti-apartheid movement became most visible in its national campaigns
for political rights, it was often organised around localised protests and boycotts, which
took infrastructure as both the terrain and the object of struggle. These struggles
intensified in the 1980s in the aftermath of the introduction of ‘self-governing’ Black
Local Authorities (BLAs) in urban areas. While the apartheid state, consistent with the
crumbling logic of ‘separate development’, presented these structures as self-standing
bodies ostensibly mirroring and parallel to the white municipalities, the BLA’s
independence was of course a fiction, if one with detrimental effects. BLAs not only
legitimatised urban apartheid, they were introduced largely to defuse urban protests that
had been occurring on a regular basis since the 1976 Soweto Uprising. From the
beginning, they were regarded as illegitimate by the majority of township residents. This
was compounded by the fact that BLAs were set up to be self-financing, and hence forced
to raise the funds for administration and township infrastructures through taxation and
service charges. Given most township residents both worked and spent their money in the
white areas, however, much of the finances of township residents, in taxes as well as
spending, remained in and benefited the white areas. This ‘reverse cross-subsidisation’
forced BLAs to raise funds by increasing charges for service provision and rents.
The effects of what might be termed fiscal apartheid thus increasingly led to discontent
and protests.
42 On the history of electricity in South Africa see, for example, R. Christie, Electricity, Industry and Class in South
Africa (London, Macmillan, 1984); for a social history of electrification and energy use in the townships around
Cape Town, see R. Lee, ‘Hearth and Home in Cape Town: African Women, Energy Resourcing, and
Consumption in an Urban Environment’, Journal of Women’s History, 18, 4 (Winter 2006), pp. 55–78.
Most central among them were the rent boycotts that began in the mid-1980s when
many township residents all over South Africa stopped paying rent and service charges.
While the boycotts were triggered by a sharp increase in rent and service charges in the
townships of the Vaal Triangle, they soon spread to other areas and became allied with the
larger aim of rendering the townships ‘ungovernable’.43 The boycotts not only fused
discontent about socio-economic neglect by the apartheid state with its symbolic rejection,
they also identified the biopolitics of infrastructure as a political question. Simultaneously,
they confronted the fiscal relationship on which this subjection was constituted – a
challenge captured by the slogan, ‘one city, one tax base’.44 By the late 1980s, the boycotts
had put many BLAs in fiscal crisis and it was increasingly difficult to carry out
disconnections or evictions in the already militarised townships. In Soweto, illegal
reconnections abounded, and by 1988, meters were no longer read and the council stopped
sending out bills altogether.45 Given the boycotts spread to many urban areas, with local
negotiations happening haphazardly, it was clear that payments for rent and services would
remain subject to political contestation in the years to come.
It was against the background of this stalemate that apartheid-era municipal engineers
increasingly began to search for technological solutions to non-payment. As one of the first
developers of prepayment technology told me, he and a colleague began developing and
testing the first prepaid meters in 1986. While prepaid meters had first been patented and
deployed in the UK for low-income users,46 he suggested that the poorer and politicised
South African context meant that prepayment technology had to be developed anew here.
Prepaid meters, he noted, needed to be made more secure, since ‘meters in the UK were very
rudimentary... People in the UK are polite, here in South Africa, people get involved in
energy theft, tampering and things like this, people here are experts.’47 The meter they
developed would be both cheaper to produce and less easy to bypass.
By the late 1980s, in a context of planned large-scale electrification and continuing non-
payment, South African companies began to commercially produce prepaid meters on a
larger scale. Then variously known as ‘Budget Energy Controllers’, ‘Econometers’, ‘E-Kard
electricity dispensing system’ or more commonly ‘Electricity Dispensers (EDs)’, prepaid
meters were hailed as ‘the next major technological breakthrough following the invention of
the computer’ since ‘at one stroke the twin problem of unpaid electricity accounts and meter
reading are eliminated’.48 Similarly, it was argued that they would aid in ‘the elimination of
bad debts, meter reading and disconnections/reconnections’.49 For yet another supporter,
prepaid meters would ‘allow the supply of electricity to communities previously considered
43 On the rent boycotts see J. Seekings, ‘Political Mobilisation in the Black Townships of the Transvaal’, in
P. Frankel, N. Pines and M. Swilling (eds), State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (Johannesburg,
Southern Book Publishers, 1988); M. Chaskalson, K. Jochelson and J. Seekings, ‘Rent Boycotts and the Urban
Political Economy’, South African Review, 4 (1987).
44 There were however divergent interpretations of the motivation of the boycotters. While some accounts
suggested that the boycotts were defined by political intentionality, others argued that the majority of residents
boycotted, because they were simply unable to pay the significantly increased rates. Importantly, however, these
interpretations themselves hinge on definitions of what constitutes ‘the political’. See here Planact, The Soweto
Rent Boycott (Johannesburg, Planact, 1989).
45 G.A. Veck, ‘The Politics of Power in an Economy of Transition: ESKOM and the Electrification of South Africa,
1980–1995’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2000).
46 Coin operated gas pre-payment meters were first patented in England in the late nineteenth century and used to
extend gas to the working classes, see, for example, A. Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity: Women and the
English Gas Industry, 1889–1939 (London, Ashgate, 2004).
47 Conversation with Actaris Metering Systems representative, Cape Town, 19 May 2006.
48 G. Malan, ‘Budget Energy Controllers Can Solve Non-Payment of Water Accounts’, Municipal Engineer, 20,
10 (October 1989), p. 58.
49 H. Bos, ‘Prepayment Electricity Dispensing’, Municipal Engineer, 22, 4 (April 1991), p. 29.
unsuitable’.50 The political implications, although not often openly acknowledged, were also
clear to many manufacturers. It was, as one engineer put it in retrospect, the result of efforts
‘to solve the problem of non-payment for electricity by means of a technology
intervention’.51 Ten years earlier, another South African manufacturer had suggested more
explicitly that ‘the development of prepayment technology . . . will help to depoliticise the
supply of electricity such that energy does not become a pawn in the ideological struggles
which the country is bound to face in the years ahead’.52
While the prepaid meters served a number of different needs for utilities, and already
foreshadowed the neoliberal emphasis on ‘cost recovery’, they were developed as solutions to
a very specific political problem that was inextricably bound up with apartheid forms of
governing urban areas. In the context of the rent boycotts, prepayment technology was
rationalised as a tool that would retrieve infrastructure from the political to the administrative
terrain. The technology would delink the question of payment from claims to
citizenship. Prepaid meters were thus developed as devices that would depoliticise what
had become an explicitly political conflict. Sedimented within the technology of the prepaid
meter is the history of the struggles against which it was first deployed.
Prepayment Neoliberalised
Though it sounds paradoxical to say that in order to make ourselves act rationally we often
find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection, or to say that to prevent
ourselves from making the wrong decision we must deliberately reduce the range of choice
before us, we all know that this is often necessary in practice if we are to achieve our long-
range aims.53
What happens with cash-stripped communities, they think they should get things for free. We try
to educate them, to change their culture.54
While prepaid meters are increasingly becoming the generalised form of connecting
(especially) poorer township residents to infrastructure, they have over time been animated
by a different rationality and authorised by a new set of reference points that partake in an
increasingly neoliberal logic. This shift does not have a clear periodisation, nor does it
map neatly onto the periodisation of the ‘transition’. Indeed, part of the argument here is that
the history of the prepaid meter is suggestive of both the continuities and discontinuities
between the late apartheid period and the post-apartheid dispensation.55 In this last section,
I will focus more closely on how the prepaid meter is rationalised and how it operates today.
This requires a closer focus on the technology itself and a more thorough interrogation of the
50 Conlog, ‘Prepaid Metering: a New Concept’, Municipal Engineer, 21, 4 (April 1990), p. 2.
51 J. Groenewald, ‘From Legacy to Legendary: Migration of Prepayment Vending Systems in South Africa’, Energy
Supply Industry (ESI) Africa, 18, 1 (April 2002).
52 See the account by a representative of an early prepaid meter manufacturing company, Plessey Tellumat SA Ltd:
M.A. Stevenson, ‘Development of Prepayment Electricity Metering Systems for Use in First and Third World
Environments’, Seventh International Conference on Metering Apparatus and Tariffs for Electricity Supply
(Power Division, Institution of Electrical Engineers, Glasgow, 1992).
53 Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 66.
54 Conversation with Conlog representative, Cape Town, 19 May 2005.
55 Indeed, a particular late apartheid form of neoliberalism had emerged during the 1980s that included the emphasis
on ‘cost recovery’ so prevalent in the post-apartheid era, yet which more centrally involved the apartheid state’s
search for mechanisms to deal with an increasingly unmanageable crisis and rising resistance. As Fine suggested,
neoliberal policies such as privatisation took on a special significance in South Africa in that they were a response
to the crisis of apartheid and as such ‘concerned the economic, political and ideological conditions which would
be confronted after the anticipated demise of the apartheid system’. See B. Fine, ‘Privatization and the RDP: A
Critical Assessment’, Transformation, 27 (1995), p. 6.
idea, prevalent in policy and municipal engineering circles, that prepaid meters are merely
instrumental tools that simplify the provision of service.
As Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich have argued, technical objects are invested with
capacities, agencies and morals that in turn make redundant, constrain or elicit particular
forms of agency and subjectivity.56 Inscribed in technical objects are scripts that both
prefigure particular users and entail injunctions to act in a particular way. The work of
technology developers and engineers thus goes beyond a merely technical exercise, indeed it
is based on the development of sociologies that anticipate users’ behaviour. The process of
developing technology is thus not merely a mechanical process, but inherently social and
moral.57 Viewed from this perspective, the origins of the prepaid meter in the aftermath of the
rent boycotts are inscribed in how the technology operates today: the meter replaces the
municipal official with a technical object, thus severing the ties of accountability to the state.
There is no negotiating, pleading or protesting when confronted with a prepaid meter.
The meter simply shuts off in the privacy of one’s home. It is for this reason that activists refer
to prepaid meter cut-offs as ‘silent disconnections’58 that are neither acknowledged by the
municipality nor afford space to negotiate or protest.
The meter does more than disconnect, however. Embodied in the prepaid meter is a set
of expectations about the shape of a particular fiscal relationship between the citizen and the
state; one which, I suggested above, has been shaped by the ways in which the anti-
apartheid struggle unfolded. In this context, the development of prepayment technology
was, at least in part, based on a sociology of counter-insurgency that viewed the user as a
political obstacle to be silenced, and sought to sever the link between service provision,
payment and claims to citizenship.59 While conventional credit metering technologies
(meters that are read and billed at the end of the month) are invested with a relationship of
trust, and the assumption of a citizenry willing and able to pay for the services provided, the
prepaid meter is based on and invested with mistrust. Inscribed in the technology is not only
56 Latour gives the following example. Cars are now often fitted with devices that alert drivers failing to put on their
seatbelts. As Latour describes at length, these alerts are so enervating that the driver will put the seat-belt on just
to interrupt the continuous flashing and beeping of the device. Unable to rely on the car driver’s conscientious
adherence to the law, such technologies impose a certain behaviour upon the driver without the need for any
moral deliberation on his or her part. Invested in this technology is thus the assumption that drivers will not, on
the basis of moral or safety considerations, obey the law. Here technology steps in to make the driver moral, in the
process circumventing the process of deliberation that may otherwise induce the driver to act morally. Invested in
technology is thus a script that both anticipates the user’s actions (‘From experience we know many drivers will
not put on their seatbelts’) and entails an injunction to act (‘Put the seatbelt on or your drive will be extremely
annoying’). See B. Latour, ‘Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’ and
M. Akrich, ‘The De-Scription of Technical Objects’, in W. Bijker and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building
Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992), pp. 205 –58. See also the
extension of these analyses to metering in the British context by S. Guy and S. Marvin ‘Pathways to “Smarter”
Utility Meters: the Socio-Technical Shaping of New Metering Technologies’, Electronic Working Paper No. 23,
School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Global Research Unit, University of Newcastle upon Tyne,
pp. 1– 41.
57 M. Callon, ‘Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis’, in W. Bijker,
T.P. Hughes and T.J. Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological System: New Directions in the
Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1987).
58 Coalition Against Water Privatization and Anti-Privatisation Forum, The Struggle Against Silent Disconnections:
Prepaid Meters and the Struggle for Life in Soweto (Johannesburg, 2005), available at http://www.citizen.org/
documents/phiri/pdf, last accessed 10 April 2008. For further analyses see also G. Ruiters, ‘Debt, Disconnection
and Privatisation: The Case of Fort Beaufort, Queenstown and Stutterheim’, in McDonald and Pape, Cost
Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery, pp. 41–57; G. Ruiters, ‘Knowing your Place: Urban Services and
New Modes of Governability’ (paper for the Centre for Civil Society, Durban, 2005) and E. Harvey, ‘Managing
the Poor by Remote Control: Johannesburg’s Experiments with Prepaid Water Meters’, in McDonald and Ruiters
(eds), The Age of the Commodity, pp. 120–7.
59 See on this question: L. Winner, ‘Do Artifacts have Politics?’, Daedalus, 109, 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 121 –36,
and the critique by B. Joerges, ‘Do Politics have Artifacts?’, Social Studies of Science, 29, 3 (1999),
pp. 411–31.
the acceptance of non-payment as a permanent feature, but also the anticipation of a non-
paying user. Disconnection from services is now no longer seen as an exception, but has
become a standard technological feature. In this way, a water cut-off that would have
constituted an exceptional emergency only a few years ago, for many Sowetans now has
become a ‘normal’ monthly occurrence.60
Similarly, the prepaid meter imposes a new temporality on transactions between utilities
and residents. It is now the user who extends credit to the utility and receives service only
upon the provision of such credit. The regular monthly or quarterly cycle of billing is replaced
by an instantaneous payment/consumption dynamic that renders the relationship of payment
provisional and temporary; much like a transaction of market exchange, in which a product is
paid for before receipt, and where the relationship between buyer and seller is a temporary
one. This linkage of mistrust and provisionality inherent in prepayment technology
reformulates the social contract between citizens and the state, producing a relationship with
the state which has to be renewed by residents every month.
In the context of Operation Gcin’amanzi, and in what can be seen as a more explicitly
neoliberal logic, prepaid meters were described as an ‘enabling technology’ that would
promote the creation of a new fiscal relationship between residents and the utility. As one of
the engineers of Operation Gcin’amanzi put it:
Probably the biggest impact (newly created dimension) that prepayment can have on a service
provider is the effective creation of a customer and therefore the focus of the service provider
becomes one of offering ‘customer service’ rather than continuing in a paradigm which considers
the end-user to be only a ‘consumer’ who is not entitled to a relationship with the service
provider.61
In other words, prepayment technology is not seen as a transformation of the relation between
citizens and the utility, but as heralding an entirely new paradigm, a ‘customer relationship’.
While the Masakhane Campaign linked payment for services to a notion of civic virtue, and
to an obligation in the context of national reconstruction, in the context of Operation
Gcin’amanzi paying for services is viewed as part of a relationship of market exchange rather
than one of right and obligation. The prepaid meter is seen to create an ‘active’ customer, one
who, equipped with the meter, will be ‘enabled’ to develop and apply the capacity for cost
benefit analysis, understanding herself as an equal partner in a relationship of market
exchange.
The engineers and planners who conceptualised and implemented Operation
Gcin’amanzi, presented prepaid meters primarily as devices that would enable the creation
of an ethic of budgeting. They suggested more specifically that the implementation of prepaid
meters ‘empowers consumers to take ownership of consumption and also transfers
responsibility for consumption onto [the] same’.62 It was further argued that prepaid meters
would enable Soweto residents to learn how to ‘use water wisely.’ Ironically, the provision of
6,000 litres of free water became central to framing the space in which calculation could be
learned. Much of the utility’s social campaign rested on showing and teaching residents how
to change their consumption to remain within the free basic water amount. Murals along
Soweto streets, as well as pamphlets distributed to households, graphically demonstrated to
residents how daily water consumption could be organised in order to remain within the free
60 As one resident put it upon hearing about the introduction of an annual ‘emergency fund’ of 4,000 litres, ‘Eish,
emergencies! We’ve got emergencies here at the end of each month!’
61 M. Rabe. Supporting Affidavit, Case No 06/13865 in the High Court of South Africa (Witwatersrand local
division), in the matter between Lindiwe Mazibuko, Grace Munyai, Jennifer Makoatsane, Sophia Malekutu,
Vuzimuzi Paki and The City of Johannesburg, Johannesburg Water (Pty) Ltd, the Minister of Water Affairs and
Forestry, January 2007, para 20.2 and 22.1.
62 Rabe and Singh, ‘Creating Efficiency Using Prepayment as a Demand Side Management Tool’.
basic water amount: ‘20 litres of water for cleaning, 6 body washes per day, 6 flushes of the
toilet per day, 2 kettles of water per day, 1 sink full of dishes per day, 1 clothes wash
every second day, 12 litres of drinking water per day ¼ 6000 litres of water usage for the
month’.63 Every household was also given a 20-litre plastic bucket so that members of the
household would become accustomed to measuring water consumption. On the back of the
Gcin’amanzi pamphlet, tariffs listed the prices of additional water credit purchases. The
pamphlet thus entailed several translations: first, from metric volume of water to its price;
second, and more important, from metric volume to specific consumption practices. The use
value of water was thus graphically translated into a series of equivalences that transformed
water into a measurable substance and, by extension, into an exchangeable object. Residents
were being taught how make daily consumption practices commensurable with universal and
thus calculable units of measurement. In the process, they were encouraged to subject their
daily actions, and indeed their bodily functions, to constant metrological scrutiny. Life itself
was here to become the subject of measurement, calculation and intervention to be carried out
not by an invasive state, but by residents themselves.
This pedagogical effort to produce calculability was also integrated into the technology of
the latest generation of meters. The meters were programmed to provide 6,000 litres per
month after which residents would have to walk to the local office to buy further credit.
By accessing the meter with a chip key, residents would be able to check, at any point in time,
how much water they had used and how much credit remained. Placing the magnetic tag on to
an indentation next to the LCD screen of the meter would produce a flashing series of
numbers and letters, detailing the free water allowance remaining, any additional credit and a
total of those figures, importantly also translating litres into monetary credit. Prepayment
technology itself thus mediated and enforced the commensuration of daily practices into
monetary value.
Simultaneously, the effort to produce an ethos of responsible citizenship, which the
Masakhane Campaign, with its focus on the moral and the cognitive, could not achieve, is
now to be accomplished through the habits induced by the prepaid meter. The re-shaping
and explicit deliberation of previously embodied practices, what Mauss described as
‘techniques of the body’,64 thus became central to this pedagogical effort. It was through
this behavioural transformation of daily habits elicited and enforced by the meter, that
residents would attain the capacity for economic calculation. Opening the meter box,
reading the meter and controlling consumption on a regular basis; walking to the local office
to buy water credits; exhorting children to stop playing with water; not flushing the toilet
after each use; making sure to switch off the tap whilst brushing one’s teeth; gauging
whether one can afford to water the garden or not; planning in advance for large
family gatherings and being aware of the potential for events that cannot be planned, such
as funerals; thinking of ways to re-use water (e.g. flushing the toilet with used
laundry water), are just a few examples most frequently mentioned by Phiri residents.
Although there is little space in this article to elaborate fully on how residents expressed
the ways in which the prepaid meter has re-shaped their daily practices,65 I will focus briefly
on how this production of calculability was raised and interpreted by some of the people I
spoke to in Phiri. In a conversation I had with a group of teenage school girls, they recounted
the ways in which the prepaid meter had changed their families’ daily lives. When one of
63 Johannesburg Water, Operation Gcin’amanzi Pamphlet, no date, obtained in 2005.

64 M. Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, Economy and Society, 2 (1973) [1935], pp. 70–88.
65 The complex and varied effects of and responses to prepayment technology in Phiri is elaborated
ethnographically in my dissertation, A. von Schnitzler ‘Liberation in a Time of Neoliberalism: Citizenship,
Technology, Politics’ (Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, forthcoming).
them began by suggesting that the prepaid meter is ‘killing our grandmothers’, the others
concurred loudly. Like many families in Phiri, most of the girls’ families relied on the
grandmother’s pension as the only stable income. It is often elderly women who bear
responsibility for catering for daily needs. Asked to elaborate, another girl, Thembi, gave
examples of how the prepaid meter had changed her family’s daily use of water:
Before when we were doing some washing, we would leave the water running, so that the clothes
would soak themselves. But now, you have to put on two dishes, where they are going to be. You
soak and wash at the same time, and the very same water has to water something [else]. And no
more flushing [the toilet]. You must wait for others [to] come. The last one will flush. And if
someone comes and takes out the waste, that is the time that you flush. Or sometimes you don’t
flush with clean water. You take the washing water.
Previously taken for granted, and thus embodied, daily practices such as flushing the toilet
or doing the laundry, here become explicit objects of deliberation and measurement.
This linking of thought and bodily practices was also clear to the girls. As Thembi went on to
suggest:
[T]hey know that if you do something, you will think about using that water, using that
electricity. You will think before that: if I waste this, it will cost me more money. So think first,
and use less. So when you make a tea. You will just put small water in the kettle. But if you just
think like a cow or like a chicken [giggles from the other girls ] you put full water, but you
only want a cup. So they want you to think, be disciplined, use yourself, you will learn
something about that. You will learn how to use your money. It’s more like, you need to make a
budget!
Her friend responded,

‘Jaaa, it’s all about budget, man.’66
The girls here identify and mock the rationality the utility intends to produce: the point is
precisely that once you have a prepaid meter, ‘wasting’ water turns you into a cow or a
chicken – calculativeness becomes an essential attribute of being human. Simultaneously, it
is, as they suggest, through these practices that such calculativeness is produced (‘you think’
and ‘use yourself’ and you thus ‘learn how to use your money’). The production of
calculativeness here is not just a cognitive process, but relies on and becomes determined by a
shift in embodied practices. As another Phiri resident put it, ‘it’s like a pill you have to
remember to swallow every day’.
If prepaid meters were installed with the intention to enforce a particular budgetary
rationality, there was an apparent slippage in the concept of budgeting as it moved from the
utility’s discourse to residents’ homes. While utility representatives presented budgeting as
an empowering mechanism that would ‘enable’ residents to calculate consumption, this
conception of budgeting hinged on the availability of a stable income, often implicitly
assumed to be a monthly wage.67 Given that many Phiri residents rely on informal,
intermittent forms of income, there often simply is no stable ‘budget’ to manage, a fact
residents often pointed to during conversations. ‘Budgeting’, enforced and translated through
the meter, therefore often meant weighing one basic need against another. What is projected
from one side of the meter as ‘empowering’ thus becomes an enforced weighing of basic
daily priorities on the other.
66 Interview with a group of teenage schoolgirls, Phiri, 7 August 2007.

67 On the normativity of the wage in relation to social citizenship, see F. Barchiesi, ‘Wage Labor and Social
Citizenship in the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 42, 1 (2007),
pp. 39 –72.
If the production of a budgetary rationality is the focus of the current programme, the
logic of prepayment, and its history in late apartheid, continues to operate within it. This is
so partly because the installation of prepaid water meters is limited and mapped onto the
historically black areas, reinforcing apartheid forms of spatial organisation. Similarly, the
fact that Soweto residents were not given the choice between a conventional meter and a
prepaid meter, with cases of refusal being met by the downgrading of their service
provision, suggests a level of coercion unthinkable in historically white areas. Most
centrally, however, and returning to Latour’s conception of technical objects as invested
with particular scripts, discipline is embodied in the technology itself. As one manufacturer
stated in uncharacteristically candid terms, ‘ultimately the meter is about control’, it’s there
to ‘teach and to force’.68 The current deployment of prepaid meters thus fuses a technical
intervention developed in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, with a quest to create a
consumer-citizen who will, on the one hand, understand the fiscal responsibilities of
citizenship, and on the other, learn how to budget and calculate consumption;
calculativeness becomes an essential attribute and ethos of citizenship.
Conclusion
I have suggested that the prepaid meter can be read as emblematic of the ambivalent
configuration of citizenship at the contradictory juncture of political liberation and economic
liberalisation. While the prepaid meter signals the potential for connection, and in the case of
the Soweto project, the provision of a limited life-line tariff, the maintenance of this
connection ultimately becomes the responsibility of each resident’s capacity to perform his or
her calculative agencies, to optimise the household’s consumption behaviour and to become
economising actors. Inclusion in and connection to the state thus become contingent upon a
successful performance of an ethic that fuses civic duty and entrepreneurial comportment.
Rather than neutral means to ends, then, infrastructures, and the technologies deployed within
them, are invested with political content. They not only redefine and materialise the shape of
the civil link with the state, but also, and more importantly, actively participate in the
construction of particular subjectivities.
The history of the prepaid meter may also be seen as indicative of how the aspiration to
bring into being economic actors, produces a pedagogical imperative that licenses the
recourse to political techniques which hark back to an illiberal regime of governance. Read in
this way, it can be argued that neoliberal projects recode previous modes of governance,
integrating within them histories of earlier state projects, often relying on mechanisms and
procedures that look quite unlike the stated intentions of reformers. As such, neoliberalism is
not a monolithic force, but rather emerges through, and comes to animate, the historical and
political contexts with which reformers are confronted. In this context, I suggest that a close
reading of how political histories and relationships can be inscribed within technology
provides us with a useful starting point to study the materiality of politics and the ways in
which it produces its subjects. The protests against Operation Gcin’amanzi, with which
I began this article, thus render visible a realm of techno-politics that usually remains
invisibly embedded within pipes and meters.
Towards the end of my fieldwork, I attended an event held at Cape Town’s glitzy, recently
built, International Convention Centre. It was South Africa’s Fourth Annual Prepayment
Week, a large-scale international conference bringing together hundreds of meter
68 Interview with CEO of one of the manufacturers supplying Johannesburg Water with prepaid meters, 23 April
2005.
manufacturers and utility representatives from all over the world, to exchange the latest
technological advances, to network and, of course, to sell their products. While many of the
municipal engineers and manufacturers who originally developed the meter are still in the
business, many metering companies have now been taken over by multinational corporations.
It is perhaps ironic that the specific histories through which the prepaid meter emerged have
now made South Africa an international leader in prepayment technology, and that the
histories embodied in the prepaid meter are increasingly being globalised and exported to
the rest of Africa and beyond. At the conference, prepayment technology was hailed as a
market of ‘endless growth’ with ‘phenomenal opportunities’ in an era of privatisation and
deregulation where ‘metering will be ubiquitous’.69
ANTINA VON SCHNITZLER

Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 452 Schermerhorn Extension, 1200
Amsterdam Avenue, MC 5523, New York, NY 10027, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
69 Notes taken during a presentation by H.A. Scott, ‘Future Technology: Integrating Prepayment and AMR’ at the
Fourth Annual South African Prepayment Week, International Convention Centre, Cape Town, 12 May 2005.

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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 34, Number 4, December 2008

Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability,

Neoliberalism and Citizenship

Reforming the Non-Paying Citizen

The Prepaid Meter as a Political Technology

63 Johannesburg Water, Operation Gcin’amanzi Pamphlet, no date, obtained in 2005.

Her friend responded,

66 Interview with a group of teenage schoolgirls, Phiri, 7 August 2007.

ANTINA VON SCHNITZLER

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