Independent Online
29 September 2007
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city and a stronghold of the political opposition, is literally drying up. If the summer rains don’t come early, it may do so.
One million people there only have water once every three days – at best.
Some are going for more than a week without water for ablutions. Some depend, even for drinking water, on the municipality’s ability to send in tankers to poor townships around the city.
The municipality is critically short of money because its major debtors, dirt-poor residents and the Zanu-PF government, in particular the Zimbabwe National Army, only occasionally pay their bills.
“It is disastrous. We fear a terrible disease crisis and the government won’t help us,” said the mayor of Bulawayo, Ndabeni Japhet-Ncube.
Japhet-Ncube and his council are members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – which is aggravating the problem, some party members suspect.
Two dams, Inyakuni and Insiza, feed the city. Inyakuni is so low, offtake will be switched off towards the end of October. Unless rain, due mid-November, falls early this year, the city will have to depend entirely on Insiza dam which will be unable to match even the hopelessly inadequate present supply of water.
The Zimbabwe National Water Authority, Zinwa, wants to take control of Bulawayo’s water assets and distribution as it has done in Harare and in other towns – with disastrous results.
Harare’s dams have sufficient water, but about half the population in the ghettos go for long periods without because of equipment failure and lack of foreign currency to import water purification chemicals.
MDC MP for Bulawayo South, David Coltart, said President Robert Mugabe’s administration was “guilty of gross dereliction of duty, it’s a calamitous situation”.
“We face a very real prospect of the entire city shutting down if we don’t have substantial rains this season.”
He said he could not rule out the “possibility” that neglect of water in Bulawayo had been “intentional”.
Coltart said Chinese contractors had pulled out “before they even got started” from a project to build a pipe from the Mtshabezi dam to the city, because they were not paid.
“Zanu-PF hasn’t even ordered these scarce huge pumps needed to lift the water over the Matobo Hills. Even if they had the money, and ordered them now, it would take two years for delivery of the necessary pipes.”
Bulawayo’s population has swelled in recent months to between 1.5 -2 million people as food supplies have dried up around the country.
“It is so bad in the rural areas that thousands and thousands have come in to town hoping for something, some food. The hospitals don’t work. We have 19 municipal clinics and we do try and keep essential drugs there but it is hard to keep nurses as everyone wants to leave the country,” Japhet-Ncube said.
“If we have early, heavy rains it will take until March to get normal water supplies to people.”