Even as junior Minister Christine Sahadeo readies her plans
for new ministries promised to be efficient and task focused,
she might find a cautionary tale at the Water and Sewerage
Authority, quite possibly the State’s grandest monument
to inefficient use of public funds.
The Regulated Industries Commission, designed to regulate
the service providers of public utilities “while facilitating
competition and promoting sustainability of the utilities”
sounded as if it had bounced its collective head on Wasa
in a recent report that found the utility wanting in every
possible category of measurement.
Wasa, the RIC report notes, provides only 50 per cent of
the country with a 24-hour water supply, falls short of
demand by more than 20 million cubic metres of water, loses
45 per cent of the water it puts into its pipes and runs
its day to day operations on a high interest overdraft,
so deep is its shortfall of income.
Wasa manages to be both a bad business and a poor public
utility, failing to live up to its public sector mandate
and subsidy in delivering water and overseeing those operations
with a business model that would be laughable if it weren’t
so tragic.
It would be unfair to Wasa to fail to point out that the
report surveys the company’s operations in 2002, but
it would be desperately optimistic to hope that any of the
fundamentals have changed since then.
Owed more than half a billion dollars, large portions of
it due from industries and government ministries, Wasa has
mounted a campaign to make bill payment easier by teaming
up with TT Post outlets. The company has instituted booster
stations to drive its water more efficiently outside city
centres and worked to seal leaks on its lines.
But the public perception of Wasa remains a dismal one.
The utility is responsible for the one resource administered
by government that is key to life, but it has failed to
live up to its own stated hopes and dreams in delivering
water efficiently and at reasonable cost to far too many
citizens of Trinidad and Tobago.
It’s “water for all” programme disappeared
in the wake of the UNC regime change in 2002. Since then,
Wasa’s most public profile came in the wake of the
political outing of CEO Errol Grimes’ salary and the
first public display of Public Utilities Minister Rennie
Demas’ capacity for Parliamentary dithering.
In March 2003, Wasa launched its Draft National Water Resources
Management Policy, a document that the utility endorsed
as its blueprint for future success, but little has been
done realise either the grandest or most practical of the
resolutions of that policy.
Now the Government is preparing to put the utility through
another massive transformation, engaging foreign expertise
and gathering a cash infusion of $27 billion into an infrastructure
that is in a financial state of collapse and is in ruinous
state in its rural extensions.
The three-year action plan hopes to bring Wasa up to the
grade of at least its sister utilities, T&TEC, which
had its own upgrade with the 1994 splitting of grid administration
and power generation into separate business units and TSTT,
which has revamped its operations in the face of ever-pending
competitors.
But improving Wasa will mean fixing a fundamentally broken
business. Wasa has failed as both a publicly-funded utility
and a professionally-run business and the utility’s
fundamental dilemma, finding alignment for the cost of producing
and delivering water and the cost its consumers expect to
pay for it will have to be resolved to the satisfaction
of both the utility’s accountants and the customers
who will have to get value for their money.
In the face of that fundamental problem, three years seem
like a woefully short time, and in setting a deadline that
falls in an election year, the Prime Minister may find it
difficult to mix political expediency with his responsibility
to the national trust.
