Dry days in Zimbabwe
by Ray Ndlovu
Last July the Bulawayo City Council closed the taps to preserve the south-western city’s dwindling water supplies. For 48 hours every week, they turned off running water to residential areas. The dry days would differ from suburb to suburb and newspapers would print notices of the days and areas to be affected.
A tiny minority of wealthy people in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, were able to rely on water from privately-owned boreholes on their properties. In contrast, most of the city’s 1.5 million inhabitants had to store water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing in buckets and large containers, carefully rationing supplies to last until running water was restored.
A month after the restrictions were introduced, the council extended the dry periods from two to three days per week. Then, in October, residents learned that their taps would give them water for just three days a week; the other four would be dry. This is where the matter stands. Current city council estimates place Bulawayo’s daily water demand at roughly 156,000 cubic metres, with the municipality able to supply only 95,000 cubic metres.
In September 2012 the city’s sewer system began to clog because of the lack of running water. The city council responded by asking residents to flush their toilets simultaneously one Saturday evening, 22 September 2012. The notorious campaign, dubbed the Big Flush, was unsuccessful, with many residents complaining that it had not been publicised widely enough. In any event, since running water had not been restored to a number of neighbourhoods on the appointed day, it was impossible for people to flush simultaneously citywide.
Rapid urbanisation and prolonged drought in Matabeleland province (of which Bulawayo was once the capital) have both contributed to the region’s profound water shortages. But petty politicking and a lack of political initiative are the main causes of water shortages in Bulawayo and Harare, the nation’s capital, where the situation is similarly dire.
Estimates from the Harare city council, for instance, place that city’s daily water demand at 1.4 million cubic metres, with the council able to deliver less than half, only 600,000 cubic metres. Chitungwiza, a satellite town located 25 km south of Harare, has endured dry spells lasting two weeks, while the high-density suburbs of Tafara and Mabvuku in Harare last had running water in 2006.
At a water summit held on the sidelines of the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair in Bulawayo in April, Bulawayo’s director of engineering services, Simela Dube, blamed the city’s water-supply problems on decaying infrastructure. The water-supply infrastructure, he said, would need $170m investment over the next five years before adequate supply could be restored.
The two-day summit served a two-fold purpose. First, it shone a spotlight on the city’s water crisis; second, it was a public indictment of President Robert Mugabe’s government, which had failed to move swiftly to end the city’s desperate water shortages.
Experts have long agreed that a permanent solution to Bulawayo’s water problems lies in drawing water from the Zambezi River, nearly 450 km north-west of the city. The idea, first mooted by the colonial government in 1901, led to the formation of the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP) in 1912. The MZWP, also called the Zambezi Water Pipeline Project, envisions the construction of a dam on the Zambezi and the drawing of water through an underground water pipeline to Bulawayo.
The Rhodesian government conducted the first pre-feasibility studies in 1934, but nothing was done on the project until the crippling Matabeleland drought of 1991 and 1992, which forced the Bulawayo city council and others to revisit the idea. It is estimated that the MZWP would cost more than $500m.
After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, Mr Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party took charge of the MZWP. To whip up political support in Matabeleland, he promised to implement the project and deliver water to the people of Bulawayo. The party gave control of the project to Dumiso Dabengwa, a popular political figure in Matabeleland. Three decades later, these promises remain unfulfilled.
Dabengwa left Zanu-PF in 2008, and the following year the Zimbabwean unity government took control of the MZWP. The man currently at the helm is Samuel Sipepa-Nkomo, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)-aligned minister of water development and management.
Viewing attack as the best form of defence, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF blames Bulawayo’s MDC-run city council for blocking the pipeline project. This is part of a general trend in the country in which Zanu-PF politicians use the water crisis as an opportunity to score political points against the MDC, whose councillors dominate the city councils of both Harare and Bulawayo. Yet city councillors are ultimately powerless and work under the close watch of Ignatius Chombo, the Zanu-PF minister for local government, urban and rural development, who maintains a tight grip on the operations of both councils.
Zanu-PF’s attempts at blame shifting have convinced few and water has become an emotive issue that promises to erode what little support Zanu-PF still has in Bulawayo. Political favour in Bulawayo leans towards Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, which has used the anti-Mugabe sentiment in Matabeleland to bolster its political stock in the province in the past 13 years. This sentiment is rooted in Zanu-PF’s political marginalisation of the province, and, specifically, in the killing in the 1980s of nearly 20,000 people there during the Gukurahundi (a Shona term for the early rain that washes away chaff).
Two years ago, Sipepa-Nkomo boosted the MDC’s standing in the court of public opinion when his office gave the green light to the construction of the Mtshabezi water pipeline. This has long been touted as a possible short-term solution to Bulawayo’s water problems. The pipeline, built by a Chinese construction company in 2012, is intended to provide relief to the city’s residents by allowing additional water to be drawn from the Mtshabezi Dam, a reservoir on the Mtshabezi river, south-east of Bulawayo.
But only a fraction of the Mtshabezi supply potential is being harnessed, as recurrent power cuts have affected the pumping of water into the city’s water reticulation system. John Ferguson, a member of the Bulawayo City Council’s water committee, said that work was under way to fix the power problems. “We expect the pipeline to be fully functional by the beginning of June, when we expect to pump [the maximum capacity of] 17,000 cubic metres a day,” Ferguson said.
In early June, the water committee conceded that little progress had been made in fixing the technical faults affecting the Mtshabezi pipeline. The Bulawayo city council, in turn, urged Sipepa-Nkomo to declare the water situation in Bulawayo a national disaster. The council’s position is that the city should be declared a dry area as this will open opportunities for donors to invest and improve the water situation in the city, said Amen Mpofu, Bulawayo’s deputy mayor.
Meanwhile, Harare’s MDC-aligned mayor, Muchadeyi Masunda, says his council needs $2.9 billion to meet the city’s water challenges to build three dams on the outskirts of the city. “We would like to construct water works at Kunzvi Dam [south-east of Harare]…at a cost of $539m…and this will give us an extra 250 megalitres of water,” he said. “There are also plans for Musami Dam, with a cost of $886m, and Mazowe Dam, a long-term project which is estimated to cost $1.5 billion.”
Ineptitude and a lack of accountability by the Harare city council has led to a deterioration of water supplies in the city, said Simbarashe Moyo, chairman of the Combined Harare Residents Association. “It is not about maintenance works, as the council keeps telling us, but about incompetence and a lack of prioritisation,” he added. “We have reservoirs that are full, but the council is failing to deliver the water to the people.”
In any case, Zanu-PF is unlikely to want the expansion of water supply to take place soon. The crippling water shortages provide the party with a welcome opportunity to score political points against the MDC in the run-up to the elections scheduled for later this year.
Of course, the lack of running water is far more than just an inconvenience for the beleaguered residents of Zimbabwe’s major cities. Humanitarian disaster looms. Harare’s water shortages were linked to the deadly cholera outbreak in 2008 in which more than 4,000 people died, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Subsequent outbreaks of typhoid in that city led the UN body to warn urgently that such outbreaks would persist until authorities stepped in to fix the water issue once and for all. The WHO, Oxfam and other organisations are now warning that with water flowing through taps for just three days a week in the residential areas of Bulawayo, there is a high risk of cholera in that city too.
An urgent commitment to expand failing water supply is needed to avert a humanitarian disaster of major proportions. In the meantime, Zimbabwe’s two largest cities are sitting on ticking time bombs.
