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Conrad Mupesa
Mashonaland West Bureau
Lake Chivero Users Association has called on Government to consider expanding the water body’s catchment area to help prevent it from extinction.
The lake is one of the country’s seven sites under the RAMSAR Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands.
Speaking last Friday during a wetland symposium at the lake, which was organised by the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) and bankrolled by a Chinese ferrochrome producer, Afrochine Smelting Pvt Ltd, various lake users bemoaned how the vast inland water body was being threatened by various unsustainable human activities.
Poor waste management, illegal mining, unsustainable farming practices and deforestation remain some of the key activities that threaten the longevity of Lake Chivero.
One user, Mr Garry Stafford said: “I asked the former Environment and Tourism Minister, Francis Nhema, why we were not expanding the catchment area of Lake Chivero to include some of the farming areas into the area and turn it into Chivero Basin Conservancy.
“The conservancy will then have wild animals expanded into the area and other sorts of tourism facilities. Apart from saving the lake, it will have potential to help drug addicted youth from neighbouring Harare and Norton.”
Mr Michael Gomo, another user, said the Zvimba district lands committee, under which the dam falls, should reign in people who have illegal farming settlements sprouting around the lake, whose agriculture practices pose great danger to the water body through siltation.
Various experts including Zimparks’s ecologist and RAMSAR focal person, Mr Terrence Magqing, said the lake was being threatened by the hyacinth weed which thrives on high protein from waste disposed in the form of sewer by the Harare City Council through Lake Chivero’s feeder streams, including Mukuvisi River.
Online Reporter