Bulawayo City Council in emergency meeting over water crisis

By Tichaona Sibanda
10 January 2006

Bulawayo’s water situation has dramatically reached critical levels, forcing the city officials to convene an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss the situation. While the city and the country have generally enjoyed good rains in the last three weeks, levels of water in dams that supply Bulawayo are still going down at an alarming rate.

Bulawayo based journalist Loughty Dube said the emergency council meeting was most likely going to adopt a set of resolutions that will see, among other things, a drastic reduction in the volume of water each household will use per day. The city is currently under water rationing and the use of hose pipes has since been outlawed, but the council still believes some residents are exceeding their daily limits because they can afford to pay penalties for breaching the water rationing scheme.

Dube said each household is allowed at least 400 litres of water per day but that this could be downgraded to between 250 to 300 litres. ‘Most people use more than the allocated volume of water because they can pay the $Z8000 fine without a problem. But council wants that fine increased to Z$80 000 which will force residents to think again,’ Dube said.

Another resolution likely to be passed on Wednesday concerns the banning of construction projects in the city. This is to be done in a bid to conserve the little water still flowing into its storage tanks following the decommissioning of Umzingwane and the Upper Ncema Dams in the deepening water crisis.

At the last inspection in early December last year, the council dams were only 34 percent full but this figure is believed to have gone down by almost half. This prompted the council to seek urgent intervention before it is too late.