Diarrhoea knows no protocols. When it hits you, and it can be fast and furious, it doesn't matter who stands between you and a toilet. If a president were between you and your destination, you would run him over and deal with the consequences later. It is because diarrhoea brooks no obstacles between its victim and the loo that I find troublesome the growing trend to restrict access to toilets in public places to those who have coins to spare.But a much more fundamental point is whether, as a society founded on the principle of equality, we can allow the jingling of coins to be the sole determinant of access to as basic a facility as one that enables one to relieve oneself with dignity.Public toilets and access to them have long been associated with civilisation. Key to the Greek and the Roman civilisations was the development of sanitation, including public toilets. Toilets were, and remain, crucial to the prevention and management of disease.Access to decent toilets, whether communal or private, also talks to human dignity. This point was underscored most recently by the cases of open toilets in Khayelitsha in Cape Town and Rammulotsi township in the Free State.story_article_left1South Africa's Bill of Rights affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom.The growing practice of charging a fee for access to toilets at shopping centres and petrol stations offends this principle. This past year I have had to pay fees ranging from R1 to R2 for access to toilets. This was at a petrol station in Standerton, Mpumalanga; a shopping centre in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal; and at The Firs in Rosebank, Johannesburg.I suspect that the restricted access to these facilities may have to do with keeping them clean, the justification being that charging a fee will prevent "the great unwashed" from using them. If so, this would be a very weak case. A shopping centre, which qualifies as public space, cannot justify restricting access to toilets.Even if the tolling of public toilets is aimed at keeping out the poor, the measure will hit affluent customers, too. Most people do not walk around with lots of coins. Most keep coins in the car to pay for parking. Even if one has coins, diarrhoea doesn't take kindly to obstacles, of which the search for the right coin would be one, between its victim and a toilet.The restriction of access to public toilets also talks directly to a point articulated by the late American economist Arthur Okun. He was a member of president John F Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers and later chaired the council towards the end of president Lyndon B Johnson's term of office.Okun argued in a 1975 book, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, that a capitalist democracy generated double standards. It did so through an egalitarian political and social system (democracy) and its capitalist twin, which generates gaping economic disparities.He argued that the mixture of equality and inequality sometimes smacked of inconsistency and even insincerity. To the extent that the system worked well, it generated an efficient economy, but the pursuit of efficiency necessarily created inequalities.And hence, argued Okun, society faced a trade-off between equality and efficiency.In the case of toilets, the trade-off is between having clean toilets and equal access to such facilities, specifically in public places such as shopping centres.Okun therefore warned that given the chance, the tyranny of the dollar would sweep away all other values and establish what he termed "a vending machine society". He called for the protection of the rights and powers that money should not buy. This, he suggested, could be achieved through detailed regulations and sanctions, and with assistance to the poor.But Okun also argued that the market must be given enough scope to accomplish the many things it does well. One of these, he said, was how it limited the power of the bureaucracy and protected "our freedoms" against transgression by the state. A recent reminder of this role of the market was when financial markets played no small role in whipping President Jacob Zuma into line after he controversially sacked finance minister Nhlanhla Nene.story_article_right2Okun was optimistic that a democratic, capitalist society would continue to search for better ways of drawing the boundary lines between the domain of rights and the domain of dollars."To be sure, it will never solve the problem, for the conflict between equality and economic efficiency is inescapable. In that sense, capitalism and democracy are really a most improbable mixture. Maybe that is why they need each other - to put some rationality into equality and some humanity into efficiency," Okun concluded.Tolling public toilets may give those of us with coins to spare clean toilets, but it will come at the price of equal access to as basic a facility as one needs to answer the call of nature. This is even worse when the call is as urgent as diarrhoea demands.mabheki65@gmail.comSikhakhane is deputy editor of The Conversation Africa..