From 1972 to 1975 I worked for Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners. This firm of engineering consultants had provided years of good service to the colonial authorities of the British Empire but had been forced to leave Salisbury, Rhodesia in some haste after Ian Smith made his Universal Declaration of Independence. They had two hundred professionals working out of their Nairobi office when I called in looking for work after a two months trek by land rover from Europe...my second trans-African journey. These professionals...mostly civil engineers...were there to service Gibb’s new clients in East and South Africa and the Middle East.

While with Gibb I wrote a few lesser reports that took a week or so....a Japanese Tourist Project in Western Kenya, a Commercial Development Project for Port Louis in Mauritius etc...and three proper reports that took many months. One of my proper reports was a regional road development plan for the Sultanate of Oman. The other two were reports on the long-term water needs of Kenya’s Central Rift Valley and Malawi’s commercial capital Blantyre. Sir Alexander Gibb sent the proper reports to the commissioning authorities who passed them on to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) for project funding.

The Sandhurst-based Sultan of Oman…and his economic advisers from the City of London…were a little puzzled about their need for the World Bank as they had rather a lot of oil. But it was suggested that the rebellion on their Southern border might get out of hand so they eventually figured out that a World Bank presence constituted protection. The Sultan’s advisers were also persuaded that to put down the uprising they needed to build a very large macadam road to move guns and soldiers from the hotels of Muscat to and from the battle zone…even though skirmishes in the South had never involved more than half a dozen ‘insurgents’.

Meanwhile further south the Kenyans were persuaded that they needed to dam the Turusha Gorge in the Kenyan Highlands and the Malawians were assured they needed a second water pipeline...and electricity from ESCOM in South Africa...to meet the commercial needs of such vital development projects as the New Carlsberg Brewery shipped out from Copenhagen to Blantyre when the Danes built themselves a new one. I am not sure I learnt much from my foray into the roads business…although counting donkeys and camels and writing a computer programme to turn them into trucks and traffic jams twenty years hence is enlightening.

The two water supply projects taught me a couple of things…things which have escaped the notice of many people throwing up their hands in horror about the Global Water Crisis. Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard have written a book about Large Dams in which they pointed out that most large water projects are driven by civil engineers wanting to construct dams, reservoirs and pipelines but their true purpose is not the supply of water but the supply of World Bank debt-equity money. Nothing in my engineering studies at Cambridge University or my business studies at Stockholm University had prepared me for such wild ideas.

The Blantyre Water Supply Report was interesting for several inter-related reasons …standpipe policy, peak supply and demand characteristics and water pricing policy. The first was central to the Bolivian dispute with Bechtel. To capture the rain landing on your roof all you need is to fashion some guttering and lay hands on a barrel to trap the water. Let this free water run away down the hill and you will need to bore a well, dam a stream or build yourself some pipelines to bring it back again. I wrote an appendix on water catchment tanks which was removed from the final report. Standpipes and water charges were the way forward.

Peak supply and demand characteristics fascinate engineers…and this fascination leads to chronically over-designed engineering systems when First World standards are applied to Third World realities. There are several aspects to this issue including the breakdown of water extraction relations on the water supply side and the perverse effect of water pricing policy on the water demand side. I wrote an appendix about garden watering to address some of these issues…and to my surprise it was not removed from the final report.

When urban water supply systems are developed the first water source is invariably the cheapest...and this has nothing to do with inflation. You tap the nearest water supply first and then go further and further afield for your water supplies as the town grows. Put this together with the anatomy of water demand and social justice requires that drinking water should be priced close to the cost of the first water supply scheme.

Restrict urban water supply policy to clean drinking water for all and many engineering schemes built to meet ‘rising demand'…with their dams and pipelines, pumps and boreholes…become luxury developments. An equitable water pricing policy would price water in terms of a Hierarchy of Needs with water prices increasing dramatically as customer water wants rise…from drinking to washing to toilet flushing to garden watering to washing bottles at the local Coco-Cola Bottling Plant. This policy would bring social justice to the urban poor.