The Lanzarote Citizens' Water Council has responded this Friday morning to the information published by La Voz on Thursday, which reported that the company Canaragua, part of the multinational group Veolia, had expressed interest in taking over the management of the integral water cycle on the island. For the moment, Canal Gestión Lanzarote, a subsidiary of Canal Isabel II from Madrid, continues to maintain control.
In the aforementioned statement, the Board began by pointing out "29 months of unfulfilled promises to citizens by the Insular Water Consortium, made up of the Cabildo and the seven island municipalities, due to serious problems with the water supply."
Thus, they have recalled that "water is a basic element for life and in our islands a scarce commodity, therefore, the right to access it in sufficient quality and quantity should be guaranteed". However, they have lamented that in Lanzarote and La Graciosa, for users of the service, it is not, "especially for subscribers of water for domestic and agricultural use, since no cuts are recorded in water for tourist use".
In this regard, they have indicated that "the lives of the population in many areas of the island are made very uncomfortable by the daily selective cuts in supply, as a consequence of the abusive and inefficient privatized management in the hands of Canal Isabel II, which prioritizes profitability over equitable access to water".
The privatization of water in 2013
In 2013, the governing group of the Cabildo (CC – PSOE), supported by the island's town councils, through a negotiated procedure, "decided to privatize the management of the integral water cycle, with the intention of protecting their political colleagues who had their assets seized by the Commercial Court and who, in some way, subjected the public water company (Inalsa) to corruption, plunder, and interested waste, justifying this measure with the argument that private works better than public".
The Board has recalled that "citizenship at no time authorized this measure, on the contrary, it has been imposed on them, as has been proven in the various mobilizations that took place at the time, claiming that water management remain within the public sphere". Those mobilizations carried the slogan “Public water is not sold, it is defended”.
Problems "worsened" after privatization
The aforementioned document has pointed out that "once the service was transferred to private hands, the problems not only persisted but, after twelve and a half years of private management, they worsened severely, thus proving this measure to be detrimental to the public".
The Water Board has added that "the concessionary company has not been able to adequately provide the service by its own means". To which it has added that "its disastrous management proves this, with the accumulated debt amounting to 75 million euros by 2024".
The water emergency: "a con trick"
"We must not lose sight of the fact that the company, with its mercantilist vision of an essential good like water, seeks to maximize its profit rate and, since it is not achieving this, it plans a strategy, which is none other than to force public administrations to intervene, and thus, with the injection of taxpayer money, to finance the investments that the concessionaire is obliged to make by contract, with the water emergency scam".
Currently, they have pointed out that the private management model has "collapsed" and "utterly failed," while also "demythologizing the neoliberal concept that private works better than public"
"The public's disillusionment with the disaster in water cycle management has translated into increasingly numerous and frequent criticisms. Trying to avoid becoming accomplices to this failure, the governing group (CC-PP) announces the penultimate measure of so many announced and with no practical effect for subscribers. According to these political leaders, this new proposal of "scope" and "bravery" is none other than: the Rescue of the Service, which consists of ceding the management of the service again to a private company, in other words, the privatization of privatization.
When the politicians who govern us insist on privatizing collective social assets (as in this case, water), they are acknowledging their administrative incompetence by asking others to do it, who, incidentally, were never democratically elected by the people. They objectively and materially demonstrate their ineptitude in managing assets of social and collective ownership, acknowledging that their political role only serves and favors the particular interests of a minority and is against the general interest of the island's citizens.
Now we see how policymakers try to cushion their discredit for the failure of the chosen model, which has done so much damage, by trying to confuse citizens with their latest proposal, for now, the grand water pact, which no one knows what it consists of, implying that they are concerned about the water crisis the population is suffering, presenting themselves as saviors, or at least, those who have shown the most interest in resolving a problem they themselves have irresponsibly generated by privatizing the integral water cycle and the neglect they have shown in overseeing the concessionaire's management. But this hypocritical reaction comes too late and responds more to social pressure than to a true political will.
Calls for public management of water
From the Citizens' Water Council, they have defended the recovery of the public nature of the service and have shown their opposition to a new privatization of the integral water cycle, as they consider that "it seriously harms citizens, as the experience of the last twelve years indicates". In this regard, they have insisted that this measure "constitutes an electoral fraud, as it is not contemplated by any political party in their electoral program, nor does it have the approval of the population"
"It is necessary that in Lanzarote and La Graciosa, the basic water service be maintained as a public good and not private or commercial," the Citizen Water Table has defended. In other words, "water belongs to the commons, those non-profit spaces of life that must be preserved for citizens."
