dyton mupawaenda
Central Government has had to, once again, intervene to ensure that growing piles of Harare garbage are collected and the tiny available pumped water supply of just 250 megalitres a day for the whole metropolitan area is raised to the minimum of 350 megalitres needed for basic health.
A large fleet of trucks as well as the specialised compactors has been mobilised, along with the sort of equipment normally needed for roadworks so that the piles of rotting garbage can be lifted into the trucks and so taken away.
A plan breaking the city down into five zones has been drafted and the truck and earth moving fleet will be moving into all five, starting with the worst.
The Government reckons it will take a week to get the bulk of the uncollected and rotting filth safely out of the city and its streets, although we suspect a lot of extra effort outside the inadequate municipal services will be required to keep it off the streets and empty lots.
Already preliminary efforts in just one day have seen 122 tonnes of garbage taken to Pomona, garbage just left to pile up near houses, markets and businesses after Harare City Council was unable to take it away regularly and adequately.
The mess over the water supply appears to be purely financial. Harare City Council has not been buying enough treatment chemicals. The Government is now having to intervene and help with emergency funds so that the population of the largest metropolitan area does not fall sick and die. The intervention over garbage and water, and thus the interference with the municipal independence of Harare City Council, has been easy to justify.
Harare is now the epicentre of the Zimbabwean cholera outbreak, which is getting worse, and in those circumstances emergency measures can be taken.
Announcing the measures Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Douglas Mombeshora was quite explicit. Cholera is an easily preventable disease.
It simply requires people to have access to clean water, proper sewage disposal and zero stacked garbage, and it is here that Harare City Council has failed and so is now having to manage a cholera outbreak.
In theory, the largest and richest urban authority in Zimbabwe, with a GDP per capita significantly above the national average, should not need help from central Government.
It should in fact be an example of how advanced services can be in the country and should be pioneering these services and upgrades to these services. This is how it operated until around 2000 when the rot started.
It should be noticed in this latest crisis that the Government is not moving engineers and technicians into the water treatment works; it is not taking over the Pomona dump now under independent management under a contract with the city council, although the council later tried to repudiate the only deal that ever made much sense.
It seems that the water works have technical staff who know precisely how to treat water, they just need more chemicals.
In fact city engineers have been remarkably frank in explaining their challenges, one being the gradual deterioration in sewage treatment works so that these days the water works have to do a lot more and spend a lot more to get potable water. The technical staff are also quite blunt over how increasingly difficult it is to maintain water pipelines and sewers without adequate budget and cashflow.
The problems are at a much higher level, partly in the senior levels of municipal management and most particularly at the very top, within the city council itself, where the overwhelming majority of councillors simply do not care, refuse to give leadership and seem unable, in many cases, to understand exactly what the city needs and how those needs can be met.
The present city council, the latest in a line with the majority drawn from the opposition, must have spent a lot more time since being sworn in during August last year fighting three mayoral elections, which also includes electing committee chairpersons, than it has trying to work out what to do about the water supply, the garbage collection and the sewers.
Municipal government in Zimbabwe was introduced, way back in the 1890s, with precisely these basic responsibilities.
The first urban local governments were called sanitary boards, a name which stresses their public health responsibilities over water, sewage and garbage, even if this was just protecting wells from contamination, getting rid of sewage safely and making sure no one collected rubbish on road sides.
Harare City Council right now could not even meet the standards of one of those simple sanitary boards without central government support.
Yet there is hope. Harare over more than 130 years of local government has had challenges and overcame these, which is why there is infrastructure that must now be repaired, maintained, replaced where necessary and extended.
To take one example, the decade after independence when a new majority-rule council came into office under Dr Tizirai Gwata facing a host of challenges.
Services needed to be equalised across the old racially divided suburbs, services in most of the high density suburbs had to be brought up to the sort of minimum the rest of the city enjoyed, and all this had to be done while the population was expanding rapidly and there was a building boom, that needed to be guided by decent planning. There was also a huge staff turnover.
Clr Gwata was at least backed by a respectable council, containing a lot of hard-working new councillors, many of them from what was then a fairly small pool of professionally trained talent, but they knew their duty.
Rapid training courses built up the pool of qualified and competent staff and the council took a deep breath and in a whirlwind decade made a huge difference. In that first decade the water supply was doubled, antiquated sewage treatment was replaced by works that won international engineering awards and were designed for easy future expansion, the town planning department was upgraded so it could ensure that developers did obey the law, inspectors made sure all food outlets were safe, new equipment was bought for the fire and ambulance service, and generally Harare became a beacon of how a third-world city could modernise and develop.
There are those who remember the influx of tourists, from big businesspeople to backpackers, who based themselves in Harare while visiting the many attractions and business opportunities of the country.
Yes, there were odd cases of cholera. Someone would come in with a back of fruit or something from a remote border district and a single family would be hurriedly whisked into the infectious diseases hospital, treated and released. It did not spread and no one worried.
Progress continued into the 1990s, and then nothing. No more additions to the water supply. Sewage treatment was not maintained, let alone expanded. Town planning was not enforced and then the land barons moved in. And after more than 20 years we are now at the present stage.
The solution seems obvious, a council prepared to work, able to work and willing to put the city right.
Online Reporter