Bottled Water Anyone?

I hate Voltic. It has a chemical aftertaste that leaves me feeling nauseated. Voltic is Ghana’s ‘Evian’, its major bottled water. In fact, it has become so synonymous with drinking water in West Africa than when people want water, they ask for Voltic. For me, it tastes so bad that I crave UK tap water.

It also upsets me that I have to bring one of these bottles every time I visit a community, when I go and do my interviewing. In my view, it causes me to lose ‘face’, and reinforces a community’s perception that I am a weak, privileged Westerner who needs things like bottled water, malaria pills and chocolate to survive. I would go the ‘pure water’ route – that is, drinking the ‘filtered’ water from the sachets, now commonplace throughout sub-Saharan Africa. But last time I did that, I was sick for a week. At least with Voltic, you are assured of completing your interviews.

But the rapid proliferation of terrible-tasting bottled water in sub-Saharan Africa gets you thinking about what is being done here to fix the water quality problem. You hear about the tens of millions of dollars poured into, say, Sierra Leone, to fix the Goma Water treatment facility, only to realize that the label ‘water aid for the poor’ is simply a euphemism for privatization and exploitation of the impoverished. The hundreds of conditionalities attached to water aid turn what should be a freely-available resource for all into a priced good. The liberalization of water markets in developing countries, as we well know, is exacerbating poverty, Sierra Leone being a microcosm of the situation in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.

This, however, is a story that many of us are well acquainted with, and certainly nothing new. But the concurrent expansion of bottled water in sub-Saharan Africa is, and raises the question of whether there is some collusion taking place. Voltic aside, in Ghana, you will find Dasani and BonAqua, products of the Coca Cola Company, in most restaurants and chop bars, and on the shelves of every shop. For an outfit like Coca Cola, there is certainly reason to ensure that the quality of water does not improve anytime soon in a place like Sierra Leone.

I constantly complain about the taste of Voltic, but most Africans would welcome the day that Voltic-quality water flows from their taps. I am not too confident of witnessing this in my lifetime, however, because there is simply too much money at stake for donors and multinational companies to maintain the status quo: a privatized water sector and a complementary bottled water industry, both dominated by foreign players.