Online Reporter
ZIMBABWE’S streams and rivers are in danger, and along with them are the storage dams, from little farm dams and weirs to the major and expensive irrigation backbone in the Lowveld, with ground water retreating as wetlands are drained.
Many rivers, especially as they run past towns and cities and through densely populated farming areas, are becoming carriers of silt, taking off the topsoil of eroded stream and river banks.
And miners, both large and small-scale, illegal and legal, have been adding to damage through panning, digging in the river banks and silt beds contributing to the erosion and silt formation.
The upshot is that a lot of our water storage is being degraded, with dams filling with silt, usually sand and the other heavier particles, while the topsoil carries on the ocean.
When floods come, and even in the worst droughts there are periods of heavy storms, the damaged land and streambanks cannot cope and the problems just get worse, instead of the extra surges of rain flooding wetlands and filling dams.
Climate change means we need all the water we get, and correct and managed irrigation is seen as the capstone of our future agricultural systems.
But irrigation means a lot more than just a few dozen large dams. It includes all that water harvested on farms, all the water in streams and rivers as well as the water in small and large dams.
A degraded river that once was perennial is now often dry for months of each year, even if it experienced floods at the height of the rains, because it is no longer being fed from water stored in its watershed in all sorts of natural ways.
We have a lot of very good laws for managing the environment and making sure water is used properly.
One problem is that the administration of these laws fall under several Government ministries, with often conflicting constituencies and often not much in the way of joint action for short-term, medium-term and long-term results.
Since Parliament votes the money to spent by each ministry, it is difficult to fund joint actions, yet such joint action is usually essential.
President Mnangagwa is now cutting through the twisted bureaucratic knots and complications of how funding can be organised for joint action.
He has declared 17 river systems a state of disaster and has set up a controlling committee from all affected ministries chaired jointly by the Ministers responsible for the Environment and for Water.
The state of disaster allows both the more effective enforcement of the law and unclogs the complications of joint action.
We note the President designated river systems, not just the rivers which are usually just the final result of the whole system. So fixing the mess we are fast drifting into means that those responsible for doing this, and the President has named positions so he can keep track, have a very wide ambit.
Mining has been seen as the easiest point of attack on degradation. We have already banned all mining whatsoever along river beds and river banks, although the word has not reached everyone doing such mining. But that is perhaps the easiest point to start with.
Urban settlements, and regrettably some urban councils, including major cities, have been allowing businesses and developers to move into and drain the wetlands.
These, if nothing else act as the sinks for recharging ground water that the same developers drill boreholes to grab. They have many other functions, but this is one problem where very short sightedness can negate all advantages and more of badly worked out development.
We used to stop people planting along stream banks and river banks.
There are ways of using some of that land, but the users have to be prepared to follow exceptionally stringent rules intelligently, rather than just exploit and degrade land for a short-term benefit.
Usually such use means harvesting fruit or other non-intrusive activity.
And we need to start rehabilitating land and dams and river beds and banks.
This needs much more than just earthmoving, although that can be important, but restoration of ecologies, planting the right sort of trees and other plants that can, over some years and decades, rebuild arid sands into useful soils.
The rehabilitation might well involve using some of the shifted silts to rebuild banks and natural flood defences.
But overall we need to work out and implement schemes that allow sustained and continuous use of our resources for decades and centuries, regardless of climate change and cycles of flood and drought.
We have the research and the expertise, although scattered across a fair number of departments, and now the President wants everyone pulling in the same direction for the long haul.
