Bob's 'disgraceful legacy'

Zimbabweans know October as "suicide month" - when the blazing sun drains everyone's mood. Earlier this week, thermometers hit 36°C - the hottest for any October on record.

In the townships of the capital, Harare, long lines mostly of women, with 20-litre plastic containers on their heads shuffle wearily for their turn at the well. It was the ninth day without water for most of the city.

It has meant business for those who have dug back-yard wells, and sell 20litres for a US dollar.

Those waiting in queues are exhausted and frustrated, their tempers frayed. Last week police reported that 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 4000 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 flows from burst sewers.

"It needs one case and it could set off a huge chain reaction 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 the city of three million needs 1400megalitres daily, but the best it can do is 650megalitres - less than half. Lake Chivero, the sole major dam serving Harare, has thousands of litres of raw effluent pumped into it daily from the city's sewage farm.

"Twenty years ago, the Ministry of Water Affairs produced plans for a new supply source, the Kunzvi dam," said Ger Christiaens, an engineer working for a city pride organisation.

At the time, the ministry warned the government of Presi-dent Robert Mugabe that the city's population was increasing 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."