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This chapter explores the ways in which numbers and measurement became central both to the planning and implementation of Operation Gcin'amanzi and to its opposition. In particular, it examines the multiple forms of intervention attending the corporatization of water provision and the semiotic-material work of making water calculable. It also discusses the “countermeasures” produced by activists from Phiri, as they took up numerical practices to make claims on the state, along with the larger techno-political terrain within which such numerical activism takes shape. Finally, it considers how the prepaid meter became part of a larger set of neoliberal reforms at the heart of which was the introduction of new epistemologies and targets for intervention and reform.

This chapter examines the “rent boycotts” of the 1980s to show how infrastructure, the provision of basic services and payments to the state have intersected with larger questions about citizenship and forms of political expression that developed in the context of the late-apartheid period. Focusing on Operation Gcin'amanzi and the ways it became an object of large-scale protests, the chapter considers how nonpayment became politicized during the antiapartheid struggle beginning in the 1980s and how, from the 1990s onwards, it was “reframed” as a technical rather than a political problem. It describes Operation Gcin'amanzi and the prepaid meter as attempts to sever the historic link between nonpayment, infrastructure, and claims to citizenship and belonging.

This chapter examines how the fight against Operation Gcin'amanzi and the prepaid meter led five Phiri residents from Phiri to sue Johannesburg Water and the City of Johannesburg by invoking their constitutionally enshrined right to water. It uses the case Mazibuko v. City of Johannesburg (2009) as a lens to explore “what human rights do” in relation to citizenship and the political terrain. The chapter highlights the significance of the case in terms of demonstrating the translation of the politics of infrastructure into a juridico-political language, as well as enabling an analysis of the larger questions of citizenship and state obligation that were elicited by the struggles around Operation Gcin'amanzi. Finally, it explains how the legal techno-politics involving experts, residents and legal officials became central to the adjudication of key ethical and political questions in the postapartheid period.

This book examines how residents' administrative links to the state emerged as a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa and the ways that this terrain persists in the postapartheid period. It explores the techno-politics underlying contemporary conflicts from the perspective of infrastructure by historically and ethnographically following the life of a small device: a prepaid water meter. Focusing on Operation Gcin'amanzi (“Save Water”) in Soweto, the book shows how, in the aftermath of apartheid and in a context of neoliberal reforms, many of the central questions of the antiapartheid struggle such as citizenship, social obligation, and the shape of democracy in the “new South Africa” were reframed as technical-managerial and procedural questions. This chapter provides an overview of the prepaid meter as well as the concept of techno-politics, along with the triumphalist rise of liberal democracy in postapartheid South Africa.