Parched Harare faces water shortage

27 October 2011 - 12:32 By Sapa-dpa
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Bottled water. File photo.
Bottled water. File photo.
Image: Steven Depolo (Flickr)

In the crowded townships of Zimbabwe's Capital Harare are facing their ninth day without water as temperatures hit a record 36 degrees Celsius.

It has meant big business for those who have dug backyard wells,  and sell 20 litres for a US dollar.

Those waiting in queues are exhausted and frustrated, their tempers frayed. Last week police reported a man was stabbed in the forehead in a fight over a place in a queue in Glen Norah township.

During the 2008-9 summer rains, over 4,000 people died in one of  Africa’s worst cholera outbreaks, most of them in Harare. The primary source was the township’s hand-dug wells, which are usually  unprotected and into which contaminated water from burst sewers flows.

“It needs one case and it could set off a huge chain reaction all over again,” said Plaxedes Makoni, a nurse at a municipal clinic.

Nine days is one of the less serious breakdowns Harare has suffered. Earlier this year there was a three-week shutdown at the pump station. While people in the townships queued, people in the better-off suburbs drew water from their swimming pools and filtered it for drinking.

The city council says that the city of 4 million needs 1,400 megalitres daily, but the best it can do is 650 megalitres — less than half. Lake Chivero, the sole major dam serving the Harare, has  thousands of litres of raw effluent pumped into it every day from the city’s sewerage farm.

“Twenty years ago, the Ministry of Water Affairs produced plans for a new supply source, the Kunzvi dam about 50 kilometres north-east of Harare,” said Ger Christiaens, an engineer working for a city pride organization.

At the time, the ministry warned the government of President Robert Mugabe that the city’s population was spiralling exponentially and new water resources were urgently needed.

“They did nothing,” Christiaens said. “What we have is a water system in a critical state. If anything happens with Lake Chivero, it affects the whole city.”    Observers say under Mugabe’s rule, the same happened with the electricity utility, the railways, the road network, the health and  education systems, and the entire economy.

“The rot began as soon as he was threatened by a viable democratic opposition in 2000 and sacrificed everything to stay in power,” said a Western diplomat. Now 87 and reportedly ailing, Mugabe is in a coalition government, his own party showing signs of  fracturing.

“It will take any new government decades to sort out,” she said.

“Power cuts, water shortages, the threat of cholera, they’re an integral part of the foreseeable future. It’s a disgraceful legacy.”

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