“Water is a natural resource like all other natural resources, oil and gas.”
That was Water Cabinet Secretary Eric Mugaa recently, explaining why Kenyans who abstract water from rivers, springs, dams and underground sources are required to pay water use charges. The money, he said, helps support the protection and management of Kenya’s water resources, including catchments and water towers.
Pause with me, and let’s take a sip of water.
When did we, Africans, ever need to pay for the water in our streams and rain that falls from the sky? When did we become this westernised?
That statement from the CS might be a fairly ordinary statement if you think about water as a public resource, but it is a very different statement if you own a piece of land with a borehole.
Because you bought the land, paid for the survey, paid someone to drill deep into the ground, sometimes at considerable expense, until they found water.
You bought the pump and installed the pipes….and you pay the electricity bill. At this point, you have probably incured millions. Yet the water coming out of that hole is not yours – at least not in the way you might assume.
Did you know that under Kenya’s Water Act, every water resource is vested in and held by the National Government in trust for the people of Kenya. The Water Resources Authority regulates abstraction, issues permits and collects water use charges. Its current permitting framework specifically includes groundwater and says water users in the relevant categories pay according to the amount of water used.
That means there is a distinction many of us probably never think about until we own a borehole. The fact that you can own the land without owning the water beneath it.
And suddenly, a borehole is no longer just a private hole in your backyard, but a point of access to a resource the State considers part of the country’s water system.
That might sound strange, but, we should have seen this coming. Hollywood has been trying to warn us for years (This is where you are supposed to leave the page while shaking your head in disbelief, but keep reading. I promise you’ll get my point.)
Think about Mad Max: Fury Road.
In that dusty, violent world, Immortan Joe does not build his power around a mountain of gold. His fortress, the Citadel, sits above an aquifer. He pumps water from deep underground and controls its distribution.
At one point, he opens the pipes and releases water to the desperate people below, who scramble to collect it. The film makes the relationship brutally simple: whoever controls the water controls the people who need it. In the film itself, the water is referred to as “Aqua Cola”, and Joe claims it for himself.
There is even a line in the film that gave me chills the first time I watched the movie “And because he owns it, he owns all of us.”
It is dystopian fiction, obviously, but water becoming a source of power is not particularly fictional.
Then there is Rango.
If Mad Max: Fury Road gives us the extreme version of a world where water determines power, Rango gets there in a much more playful way. The 2011 animated film takes place in Dirt, a dusty town in the middle of the desert where water is painfully scarce. The residents depend on a small supply stored in a bank, and when that water begins disappearing, panic sets in.
But the real story is not simply that the town is running out of water. It is that someone has understood that whoever controls the water can control everything else.
The town’s mayor has been manipulating the water supply while quietly pursuing a much bigger plan involving land. As the water disappears, land becomes cheaper. The people become desperate and the person who understands what is happening can position himself to acquire the land and profit from controlling what happens next.
It is a children’s animated movie, but underneath the jokes and talking lizards is the serious idea that Water doesn’t just determine whether people can survive – it can determine who has power, who loses power and even who gets to own the land.
So, seriously, what happens when water becomes scarce enough to change the value of everything around it? What happens when the most valuable thing beneath a piece of land is not oil, gold or a rare mineral, but water?
Which is why the question of Kenya’s boreholes is more interesting than it initially appears. The argument is often framed as: I own this land, I paid for this borehole, so why should I pay for the water?
But the bigger question may be: If water is a shared national resource, who gets to decide how much of it each of us can take?
And once water becomes “scarce,” that question stops being theoretical.
The Case Of Gary Harrington
In Oregon in the United States, a man named Gary Harrington was sentenced to 30 days in jail in 2012 after being convicted over three reservoirs he had built on his property to store water. His case was widely reported as a man being jailed for collecting rainwater, although that description leaves out an important detail: these were large reservoirs created by dams, holding millions of gallons, and authorities said the stored water required a water right permit. Ordinary rooftop rainwater collection was exempt.
The case sounds almost absurd, but the actual dispute was about whether a landowner could capture and store water that the State considered part of a wider public water system.
And that is where this conversation starts getting interesting for us as Kenyans. We are moving into a world where water is increasingly being measured, allocated, permitted and monitored.
The Water Resources Authority is already developing a smart meter system that collects real time abstraction data from points including boreholes. The authority says that this data will be used to generate water use bills and guide regulation.
Is this sinister? You will be the judge of that.
The argument is that groundwater is not an infinite private swimming pool sitting underneath every person’s compound. Aquifers can be depleted. Rivers can be over-abstracted. Wetlands and catchments need protection and if one person extracts large quantities of water, that can potentially affect other users and the environment.
The whole point of regulation, according to WRA, is to account for the resource and ensure equitable sharing, while giving priority to basic human needs and the environment.
The uncomfortable part is what happens when water becomes scarce enough that regulation is no longer just about conservation and becomes about power.
I remember arguing a while ago that water would eventually become more important than gold and the rare earth minerals everyone is scrambling to find.
At the time, it probably sounded dramatic, but, maybe I was simply early. And it does not mean that a litre of water will suddenly cost more than a gram of gold. After all, gold can be replaced in some applications. Technology can change and industries can find alternatives to particular minerals. The bigger majority of the world has never touched real gold anyways, and look at us. We are doing just fine.
However, there is no substitute for water.
People, crops, livestock – we all need it. Cities need it. Factories need it. Entire economies depend on it.
And unlike gold, you cannot decide that you are simply going to stop using it. That is why the most important resource of the future may not necessarily be the resource that is the most expensive but the one that nobody can live without.
Perhaps that is what these dystopian films have been circling around all along. The scary future is not necessarily one where there is absolutely no water but one where there is water, but access to it is controlled.
The question then stops being How much water do we have? And becomes Who controls the water we have?
Already, in Kenya, our relationship with water is changing. WRA says its mandate is to regulate the management and use of water resources to ensure sufficient water for everyone, now and in the future. Maybe that is ultimately what the borehole debate is really about.
Not whether someone should pay a particular fee or if Government should regulate groundwater. It is about an assumption as old as time that most of us have probably never questioned. If I own the land, surely I own what is beneath it?
Apparently, not necessarily. You can buy the land, drill the hole and own the pump.
You can pay the electricity bill.
But the water? Well, that belongs to all of us.
