Back to Index

Byo down to one day of water
Kholwani Nyathi, The Standard (Zimbabwe)
December 02, 2007

BULAWAYO - The city of more than one million people will from this week be reduced to one day's supply of water a week after the decommissioning of its fourth supply dam.

Bulawayo, now facing one of its worst water shortages in living memory, has already stopped pumping water from Umzingwane, Lower Ncema and Upper Ncema dams after they ran dry.

On Friday, Mayor Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube said by today the council would stop pumping water from Inyankuni Dam, thus relying only on Insiza Dam and a few boreholes at the Nyamandlovu Aquifer.

Insiza Dam will supply the city with less than 55 000 cubic meters of water a day against an average requirement of 145 000 cubic meters.

The dam is expected to run dry in the next eight months if there are no significant inflows during this rainy season.

"We have to further tighten the water rationing regime," Ncube said. "After the decommissioning residents will be getting water once a week for about only 18 hours.

"This will have serious repercussions on the economy and health of the city."

Residents have had to endure persistent water cuts since the beginning of the year as the city battled to ration the little water available.

The government has been accused of turning a blind eye to the crisis after a Chinese company awarded the tender to construct a pipeline linking the idle Mtshabezi Dam to the city abandoned the project five months ago due to non-payment.

The cash-strapped Zimbabwe National Water Authority (Zinwa) has also been struggling to rehabilitate the 77 boreholes at the Nyamandlovu Aquifer.

The boreholes have the capacity to supply the city with an additional 15 000 cubic meters of water a day. They were vandalised by newly resettled farmers and only 28 have been rehabilitated, providing the city with 4 000 cubic meters of water a day.

"We are grateful to Delta Beverages," said the Mayor, "for donating billions of dollars towards the rehabilitation of the boreholes at Nyamandlovu and we continue to hope that the Mtshabezi-Umzingwane interlink will be completed soon.

"But the long-term solution to our perennial water problems is the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project."

The ambitious scheme to draw water from the Zambezi River some 450km away has remained on the drawing board since 1912, with successive governments failing to allocate funds for the project.

No dam has been built for Bulawayo since 1979 despite the population having grown from about 250 000 to more than one million people.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP