IMD

Next in the headlines – The chemical toilet

By: Mike Muller

When lawyers try to run your business, you better watch out or, more precisely, watch your wallet. So the appearance in various courts of the pre-paid water meter, accused of stealing from poor, cutting off water without proper warning and generally denying people their Constitutional Rights, I was beginning to get worried. Were judges and lawyers now going to settle technical issues about valves specifications and pipe diameters?

There is good news however. In case you missed it over the holiday season, the lawyers are thinking twice about trying to run our business.  For that small mercy, we have the humble VIP toilet to thank.

Residents of an informal settlement in Ekurhuleni went to court to persuade the Metro Municipality to improve water and sanitation in their area. They asked the municipality for a VIP toilet (that’s an ventilated improved pit to you city dwellers) for each household. The municipality refused, but did offer more chemical toilets, one per four households instead of ten.

The case wended its way through the court system all the way to Constitutional Hill where the worthy judges decided it was time to draw the line.  It was government’s job, not the court’s, to decide what kind of services should be provided, they said. This repeated the line taken in the Phiri water case where there was long legal argument about how much water a household needed to survive with dignity from people whose knowledge of water was limited to turning the bathroom tap and the toilet flush.

As long as government was seized with the problem of ensuring that no one dies of thirst or waterborne disease, they should be allowed to get on with the job. It was an unusually humble approach, acknowledging that the legal profession is not omniscient.

The other theory is that the judges understood that, where the water goes, waste follows soon after. And indeed, the Ekurhuleni sanitation case came up just a few months after the Phiri water case. So I suspect that the judges simply could not face the thought of wading through piles of … documents … about toilets. They might also have been mindful of the danger that someone would bring Exhibit A to court – the contents of the toilet in question.

It would have been fun to describe to the judges all the variables that determine what ends up in a toilet bowl or down the latrine pit. In another life, I had to find out how long a pit toilet would take to fill up, based on the size of the family, their income and diet. This demonstrated the limits of science; the answer depended on how much household rubbish is dumped in the pit (if you prevent that, a four metre deep pit toilet will digest happily for 25 years).

As interesting would be the discussion about the acceptability of chemical and bucket toilets. Under the last government, buckets were banished. But as the Ekurhuleni case showed, chemical toilets (just precast plastic buckets, also emptied weekly) are apparently fine. The learned lawyers and Constitutional Court judges would have been entranced by details of the difference between them.

Tongue in cheek, it has been suggested that the main difference is that bucket toilets are managed by municipalities while chemical toilets are managed by private contractors owned by municipal councilors. But that is a subject for another column.