By TARIRO MASUNDA

HARARE mayor Jacob Mafume has called on the central and local governments to urgently resolve legacy issues that continue to hound water supply and waste management services in the capital city.

Mafume said this last Friday while addressing editors during the Harare mayor meet-and-greet stakeholders’ programme that was convened in partnership with the Zimbabwe National Editors Forum.

The two service delivery crises have affected citizen’s rights to water, sanitation and other related rights, with desperate residents resorting to shallow wells and boreholes as water sources

Many of these water sources are contaminated.

According to section 77 of Zimbabwe’s constitution every person has the right to safe, clean, and potable water.

Mafume cited chemical shortages,  mismanagement  and obsolete machinery as the causes of perennial service delivery challenges facing the city.

 “Water is a big problem, we have solutions that we have applied, the biggest, biggest problem is the chemicals, we have shortages of chemicals from manufacturers we get them from very far and we have to clean water from Lake Chivero because that’s where our sewage goes”

He said the other challenge was that Chemplex, the local assembler of the chemicals imports critical  raw materials that included  sulphuric acid from South Africa, bauxite from Mozambique and liquefied lime from Zambia.

 “They have to use foreign currency, so it’s difficult if we pay them with local currency, they have to queue at the Reserve Bank to get their money.”

However, he was confident that his council can provide enough water supply with adequate chemicals supplies, and the sourcing of water from lakes Chivero and Manyame.

“Because we have got Lake Chivero and Lake Manyame … Lake Manyame never goes below 70% every year. I have looked at the statistics from Zinwa, so it means water we are not utilizing.

He said the other long term solution is to expand the aquifer in Chitungwiza, the Muchekeranwa canal which is about 80km away from Harare.

“To put it into perspective Chiredzi uses water from Masvingo 500km away to run the sugar industry and we can seem to muster the political will to get water from Muchekeranwa 80 km away to give to 3 million people.

“We also need Kunzwi dam to be finished and Musani dam to be finished. Once they are finished then we will be able to provide adequate water to everyone.”

He decried the financial setbacks arising from issues of non-revenue water usage, where about 30% of  the city’ s water that is used  is not paid for.

“That is the big challenge we need to introduce smart meters and so forth.”

He also cited absolute equipment and inadequate fuel supplies as the major challenges contributing to poor waste management.

“The problem is that we have to run a fleet of over 25 to 30 compactors 20 tipper trucks about 5 front-end loaders then we have 52 tractors that we got from government, we use about 50 000 litres per month as a city and we are buying it in cash in $Us and in zig when we can get it.

“And then of course the spares are a problem, so it’s a mammoth task on waste management for a city like Harare, so we launched five compactors.”

In line with its efforts to decentralise service delivery, Mafume said council has plans to implement community waste management programmes for compactors comparable to community health committees for health clinics which liaise with the workers about their welfare

“So what we toying with is to have agreements with wards and districts, so we take our compactor there and we agree with ward 19 that this is your truck let’s maintain it, let’s keep it, let’s circulate it, sometimes it has no fuel or the drivers are hungry let’s take care of that.

“We also want to do community waste management and encourage residents to pay, we ring-fence the money from the households to pay and so forth and then we introduce sorting at various levels so that they are recyclable.