Evaluating the LHWP Against WCD Guidelines

Africa’s largest infrastructure project the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) is a massive, multi–dam scheme built to divert water from Lesotho’s Maloti Mountains to South Africa’s industrial Gauteng Province. The first phases of the World Bank–supported project involve the construction of three large dams which, when completed will dispossess more than 30,000 rural farmers of assets (including homes, fields, and grazing lands) and deprive many of their livelihoods.

In an effort to prevent the permanent impoverishment of these people, the governments of South Africa and Lesotho promised in the project treaty that affected people will be enabled to maintain a standard of living not inferior to that obtaining at the time of first disturbance. Evidence suggests that standards of living for the majority of project–affected people are in fact declining. Few affected people have been able to re–establish livelihoods, and displaced people have been hurried into resettlement sites without access to water and other resources.

The project also poses serious threats to Lesotho’s mountain river systems because of reduced flow rates and less–frequent floods. Several endangered plant and animal species in the Senqu River basin (known as the Orange River in South Africa) will be placed under severe strain and may entirely disappear from project areas.

Sharing Benefits

WCD Recommendation
The WCD notes that those who bear the social and environmental costs and risks of large dams are frequently not the same people who receive the social and economic benefits. It enjoins governments to give social and environmental aspects the same significance as technical, economic and financial factors in weighing whether or not to construct a dam.

Reality on the Ground
The LHWP has had an undeniably profound impact on Lesotho’s economy. In 1998 it accounted for 13.6% of Lesotho’s GDP. Royalties from the sale of water and project–related customs dues make up 27.8 percent of all government revenue. Yet, the countrys poor have seen little of this economic boom. Lesotho still has one of the top ten greatest income disparities in the world, and household income figures for the LHWP northeastern mountain region fell 65 percent faster than the national average during the LHWP’s initial years.

The Lesotho Highlands Water Revenue Fund (LHWRF) is intended to distribute the projects royalties to the nations poorest. Instead, the World Bank has already been forced to restructure the LHWRF in part because corrupt local politicians were using the money to reward supporters of the ruling party.

Meaningful Participation

WCD Recommendation
The WCD stresses the necessity of meaningful participation of people whose livelihoods, human rights, and property and resource rights may be affected by dams. It calls for negotiations in which stakeholders have an equal opportunity to influence decisions from the outset of the planning process.

Reality on the Ground
Participation by affected communities has been minimal at best. Affected people have had no forum to effectively negotiate how the projects dams would impact them, let alone influence the decision to build them. In late 1999 agents of Lesotho’s National Security Service confiscated materials about the WCD from a man affected by the LHWP after he returned from NGO–sponsored regional hearings for the WCD. In Lesotho, security agents routinely attend community meetings on the LHWP, inhibiting meaningful participation.

Resettlement

WCD Recommendation
The report states, Special attention is necessary to ensure that compensation and development measures are in place well in advance of resettlement. It also notes that a clear agreement with the affected people on the sequence and stages of resettlement will be required before construction on any project preparatory work begins.

Reality on the Ground
Resettlement, traumatic even under the best of circumstances, has been unnecessarily stressful for LHWP–affected people. They received no compensation prior to displacement, despite the fact that World Bank policy requires it. They have been resettled to places without safe drinking water and, in some cases, have faced overt hostility from host communities. Many have also not yet received the promised skills training intended to restore their livelihoods.

LHWP–affected people have suffered for not having the opportunity to negotiate binding performance contracts (another WCD recommendation). Had they been in place, resettlement sites would have been ready for habitation before people were moved. Compensation would have been paid promptly and fully. And the project authorities promises of development would either have been fulfilled or not committed to in the first place.

Downstream Considerations

WCD Recommendation
The WCD states that dams should provide for an environmental flow release to meet specific downstream ecosystem and livelihood objectives. It further states that a basin–wide understanding of the ecosystems functions, values and requirements, and how community livelihoods depend on and influence them, is required before decisions on development options are made.

Reality on the Ground
The LHWP was begun without such a study. Belatedly, the governments of Lesotho and South Africa recently commissioned an Instream Flow Requirement (IFR) study to assess the impacts of the LHWP dams (present and future) on downstream communities and ecosystems. The study found that continuing with the project as proposed will reduce Lesotho’s river systems to something akin to wastewater drains. The study states that the construction of the next LHWP dam would reduce the amount of water flowing into South Africa by 57 percent but since it is restricted to studying impacts only in Lesotho proper, it does not detail what harm this will cause.

Increasing Efficiency

WCD Recommendation
The WCD states that a priority should be to improve existing systems before building new supply, [and] that demand–side options should be given the same significance as supply options.

Reality on the Ground
The continuation of the LHWP appears to have been unnecessary to meet South Africa’s water needs. Residents of Johannesburg’s townships, consumers of LHWP water, collect water from apartheid–era systems that waste up to 50 percent of water piped to them. When the projects second dam was being considered, Gautengs water utility, Rand Water, suggested that the project could be delayed as much as 17–20 years if system efficiency was increased through the use of demand–side management (DSM). At that time, the World Bank did not have staff who specialized in DSM, and was eager to keep the project moving. As a result, the Bank decided to continue with the project without a thorough analysis of DSM or the possibility for a delay, arguing that the need for supply was inevitable and a delay would drive up construction costs.