By Agencies
The taps in Zimbabwe’s second-biggest city may run dry by the end of this year.
Already, residents of Bulawayo have had to cope without piped water for at least five-and-a-half days a week and there’s a high risk the flow may stop completely, according to city officials.
“We are reaching a catastrophic state,” David Coltart, the mayor of the city of 700,000 people, said in an interview. While the rich can resort to drilling for underground water, the poor have limitedoptions, he said.
A combination of the worst drought in 40 years, a lack of investment and the marginalization of the city in the decades since independence because of political and ethnic tensions have left the city scrambling for solutions to the crisis.
Already, residents of poorer areas known as townships are having to queue — often until as late as 1 a.m. — to get water from the about 400 community boreholes the city has drilled in recent years. Water levels in surrounding dams have plunged, a result of frequent droughts and an expanding population.
It’s “a part of life,” said Ronald Nkala, a 41 year-old primary school teacher, who has been lugging five-gallon containers — weighing 42 pounds or 19 kilograms — from one of the boreholes back to his house more than a mile away since the restrictions began to be tightened to extreme levels last December.
“It’s no longer something that’s embarrassing to be seen going to fetch water.”
While towns and cities in Zimbabwe, which has been beset by political and economic turmoil for more than two decades, have struggled with water supplies for years, that’s mainly been due to broken treatment plants and leaky pipelines.
In Bulawayo’s case, there simply isn’t enough water to meet the city’s needs.
“There’s no other city in the country that’s running out of raw water,” Coltart said.
A reservoir to supply the city was last built half a century ago, and of the six earmarked to supply residents today, three are too empty to be used. Work on the half-complete Gwayi-Shangani dam, first proposed a century ago, ground to a halt in late 2022 when money ran out with $48 million still needed.
That didn’t stop President Emmerson Mnangagwa from using a recent rally to promise that water from the dam would soon arrive in the city.
Now there’s talk of another $100 million dam, which would be known as Glassblock, in nearby Filabusi. But there’s no explanation of how it will be funded.
Other municipalities in the region, including Chitungwiza near the capital, Harare, as well Johannesburg and Pretoria in neighboring South Africa, are also facing constrained water supplies. While drought has played a role, massive losses to leaks and delayed investments are the root cause. None face the severe restrictions of Bulawayo.
Extremely low water levels at Mzingwane dam forced the Bulawayo City Council to stop drawing water from the reservoir in December 2023.
The water crisis is emblematic of the neglect Bulawayo has suffered since Zimbabwe’s independence from the UK in 1980, which saw power concentrated in Harare, a five-hour drive north. Bulawayo is the historical site of the Ndebele kingdom, while Harare is at the heart of the homeland of the country’s majority Shona ethnic group.
The regions supported rival liberation armies during a guerrilla war against a Whites-only government. And in the years that followed independence, soldiers killed thousands of people in the areas around Bulawayo in a crackdown on armed dissidents.
That operation was given the green light by Mnangagwa, who was then security minister, and former President Robert Mugabe; it was known as Gukurahundi, which means the rain that sweeps away the chaff in Shona.
The city has been controlled by opposition parties since 2000, deepening the divide. While Harare has seen the construction of high-rise headquarters for banks, shopping malls and housing complexes — and even the beginnings of a new precinct for government and business on its outskirts — time has largely stood still in Bulawayo.
Abandoned pipes outside the city of Bulawayo showing that construction of the Gwayi-Shangani dam, seen by the government as the answer to Bulawayo’s water woes, has ground to a halt.
“It has been perceived as an opposition-led council,” said Stevenson Dhlamini, an applied economics lecturer at Bulawayo’s National University of Science and Technology. “National economic resources have not been gravitating toward the city.”
That means that the city is getting little help from the central government to resolve its water woes.
“There’s not much that the Bulawayo City Council can do to remedy the situation,” because they don’t have the money, said Eldred Masunungure, a political science professor at Harare’s University of Zimbabwe. “Central government must take the lead.”
The government has refused to approve the city council’s request that the situation be declared a state of disaster, a legal step that would unlock funding from donors including the African Development Bank and a number of developed countries.
The donors “will not entertain an appeal for assistance without the declaration,” said Coltart. The mayor is seeking as much as $50 million to take immediate measures to ease the water crisis.
For now, those with money are taking matters into their own hands, drilling private boreholes in residential yards and business premises.
“Our rigs in fact have not been managing with the high demand,” said Patricia Madhara, a director at Sealane Borehole Drilling. “We actually have a waiting list.”
Still, in a country where a government worker such as a teacher earns $300 a month, it’s not cheap.
For the first 40 meters (131 feet), drilling costs $1,000 and then another $25 for every further meter until water is struck, if any is found at all. Another $100 is paid in permits to the city council and national water agency. Local water catchment authorities charge owners an annual fee of $300 for the right to operate boreholes.
“Some users are reluctant to register and pay these fees,” said Day Mapolisa, manager of the Upper Gwayi Sub-Catchment Council, which covers Bulawayo.
To escape the fees, people are drilling boreholes at night, he added, saying that only about one-in-seven new ones are registered.
In Douglasdale, an area where some property owners breed horses and grow vegetables for sale, Ian, a local homeowner, said he had no choice because of the erratic water supply.
“I just had to drill a borehole. We went as deep as 200 meters before getting water,” he said, declining to give his surname for fear of raising the attention of authorities who would seek to collect fees. Even at that depth, he still worries the well may dry up if there are no good rains this year.
“We are all waiting for the rain,” he said.
A cheaper alternative is the installation of 5,000 liter (1,320 gallon) water tanks. But even those cost $400 each. Owners rely on either filling these up during the few hours when water runs through the pipes or buying water for $50 from vendors.
“The elites, the wealthy arealways going to have a way to harness water,’’ said Elizabeth Saccoccia, a water security associate at the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. “It’s a justice problem really.’’
Last season Bulawayo got just 350 millimeters (14 inches) of rain, compared with a five-year average of 471 millimeters. This summer there’s been some rain, but the rainy season has yet to start in earnest. The first storms, usually in November, are preceded by a period of intense heat. Bulawayo, is the most water stressed region among Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces, according to WRI.
If enough rain doesn’t fall and supplies dry up, people may leave.
“It will inevitably lead to an exodus,” said Coltart.
