Over the last twenty years, private sector participation in water and electricity provision has come to be accepted as necessary for the delivery of an efficient and effective service. Perversely, there is neither empirical nor theoretical evidence to support the claim that privatisation improves a utility's performance. This paradox strikes me as utterly outrageous. Nevertheless, this book is careful to avoid polemics as it carefully dismantles arguments for privatisation through its analysis of the experience in sub-Saharan Africa.
The book weaves together a theoretical framework with a series of case studies. At its heart is an exposition of the naïve assumptions made by exponents of privatisation. A change in ownership was assumed to perform miracles and yet, in reality, has very little overall effect. In spite of a lack of theoretical and practical evidence in favour of privatisation, key World Bank policymakers sensed a window of opportunity to experiment in the early 1990s. Cash-strapped governments in sub-Saharan Africa were encouraged to break up utilities and sell-off any potentially profit-making branches of a service to the private sector. Recently, the World Bank has undergone something of a rethink. However, as the book demonstrates, the Bank's ‘rethink’ following its ‘unthink’ needs to be approached with caution. Rather than focusing on how best to provide services, it merely clears the way for different forms of private sector involvement.
The case studies – in Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia and Namibia – comprise the most balanced and thorough analyses of water and electricity privatisation in sub-Saharan Africa available. Often, what emerges is not an unmitigated disaster. Instead, an expensive and futile experiment has been stalled, as private investors have been unwilling to take on long-term risk. Nevertheless, the pro-privatisation mentality persists. In a concluding chapter, Bayliss and Fine put forward their own suggestions for public utility reform. Crucially, the role of the state needs to be reconsidered and public services better understood in their economic, political, social and ideological contexts.
Overall, the book is clear, coherent, and an invaluable contribution to debates about service provision in sub-Saharan Africa. If I have any slight criticism, it would be that I want to hear much more from the users of these services. Important arguments about the inability of poor people to pay for services could be grounded within their own perspectives. Indeed the claim that some are unwilling to pay for services is, I suspect, as much a myth of policy makers and bureaucrats as the assumption that a change in ownership will transform services. Invariably, people simply cannot afford to pay for water and electricity. Perhaps more could be said about how privatisation became orthodoxy and in whose interests: I am not convinced this is all down to Nellis and Shirley at the Bank. And finally, in the book's calm dissection of policy and its explicit avoidance of invective, I wonder if something is lost. If private sector participation has become orthodoxy against any theoretical and empirical evidence, this is surely madness. Should we not be saying so?
