Hundreds of people from a diversity of backgrounds came together this week to protest the installation of pre-paid water meters in Soweto and other townships. The march was organized by the coalition Organizations Against Prepaid Water that included amongst others the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Community Independent Development Forum, Independent Baptists, Jubilee, SOPA, PAC, the Coalition Against Water Privatisation and taxi associations. Gathering at Mary Fitzgerald Square, itself an emblem of the Johannesburg Development Agency’s neoliberal city restructuring, the protestors made their way to the Civic Centre to deliver a memorandum to Mayor Amos Masondo. The memorandum listed a host of grievances about pre-paid meters, most importantly the fact that pre-paid meters allow Johannesburg Water (JW), and companies like it, to implement the harshest form of “cost recovery” – automatic self-disconnection.