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WATER is essential for life and for a lot of reasons in urban areas has to come from the tap, from deep boreholes or by truck, since water tables are falling.
In theory it should come from the tap. But many urban councils, with Harare as usual in the lead, have allowed their water treatment works to fall way behind in maintenance or have not expanded treatment plants to cope with rising demand.
Bulawayo is a special case, being short of raw water to treat, but at least has a fair rationing scheme that ensures almost everyone gets, at least for a few hours two or three times a week.
And that city will within a year have a reasonable supply via the Matabeleland North pipeline fed by the Gwayi-Shangani Dam, so we need to hope that their treatment works are capable of handling the extra work.
Harare is not short of raw water with two large dams able to feed the very large Morton Jaffrey Water Works and two smaller dams upstream on the Manyame River able to feed the much smaller Prince Edward Water Works.
The capacities were built up in colonial days, and then dramatically expanded when Harare had a functioning city council in the first decade of independence.
The Prince Edward works were never intended, after their expansion in the late 1970s, even with the raw water supply more than tripled with Harava Dam, to feed a continuous 90 megalitres a day into the pipes. The expansion was to give flexibility for peak demand.
The 1980s councils undertook a massive doubling in Morton Jaffrey and ensured the raw water was there. For a start a tunnel was drilled to connect Morton Jaffrey to Darwendale and the sewage treatment system was replaced with new technology that allowed effective recycling of water.
Then the water works were doubled in size. A second pipeline was laid from Morton Jaffrey and the large Warren Pump Station was built.
All this allowed the residents of Harare, Chitungwiza, Ruwa and Norton to have a 24/7 supply, even in a poor rainfall year with a bit of slack for expansion. But, and it is a big but, Mayor Tizirai Gwata and his councillors and their team of technical and financial experts expected three things.
First their successors on council would handle the maintenance, an obvious point, but one that these councils did not.
Secondly both the water works and the sewage treatment works would continue to be expanded. A second miss. And finally steps would be taken for Chitungwiza, Norton and Ruwa to modernise their sewage treatment works so the downstream lakes would be pristine clean.
Another box not ticked with even Harare’s works allowed to degenerate and be overloaded. Epworth, admittedly, was an extra problem those councils had not predicted, but they were assured enough boreholes would be drilled. Some were, but only enough to demand 24/7 queuing and in recent years gangs taking over the access and charging money.
Kunzvi Dam, now being built at long last, was planned in that same decade. It is not the total lifesaver that some optimists see it as. The main Manyame River treatment works at Morton Jaffrey still have to be fully functioning and expanded.
But Kunzvi is a serious addition and helps solve a geographical problem in Harare Metropolitan.
About 5km to 7km to the north and east of the city centre the ground rises rapidly along a set of ridges before sloping gently down the other side.
This means high level pumping is required over long distances to get water over places like Hillside, Kamfinsa Heights, Pockets Hill, Gun Hill, Mount Pleasant and Emerald Hill (notice the names) to the east and north. And those areas are lucky to get water once a week with a swathe getting nothing.
Kunzvi is to the north east of Harare so its water will flow into the opposite corner of the metropolitan area from Morton Jaffrey. Pumping is still required, just less.
Depending on how the pipelines are arranged it is likely that easily the largest reservoir complex in the province at Letombo, will finally be able to fill. Three-quarters of this complex is at the moment decommissioned, typical of Harare council, so the city council needs to fix that.
Because of the odd geography, south western Greendale, where the reservoir complex is sited, is almost the highest point in Harare, the pinnacle being Manresa.
The rivers in Glen Lorne and Borrowdale flow downhill from this pinnacle and from the ridge extending north from Gun Hill and so those hilly suburbs are in fact lower than the flat areas around the Manresa peak.
This is why the central distribution point was put there so that gravity rather than pumps could do a lot of the work. In fact Letombo is higher than almost the whole of Glen Lorne; the problem is the valves not being opened.
Chitungwiza is also supposed to be fed from Prince Edward and from Letombo, and a glance at the map again shows why.
When Epworth gets pipes it too will be on that network, and the fast growing Ruwa as well. So Kunzvi is important. But Morton Jaffrey still has to cope with the largest load and so needs to be fixed and expanded.
The next dam planned is to the south of Chitungwiza and should be able to cope with a good slice of that town’s needs. These additional dams are to provide extra water, and provide it in the right place.
When populations in those areas were a lot lower, Prince Edward, being further upstream, was able to cope. The Manyame River flows have decreased, largely because of the farm dams trapping so much run-off higher up in the catchment, but the two new dams are on different river systems.
All this expansion was detailed in plans drawn up in the late 1980s as a continuous programme with the Gwata council having bought the breathing space required.
Instead not only was nothing done, but the existing infrastructure was allowed to deteriorate significantly.
The Second Republic is not just implementing plans for Kunzvi, but is also trying to get Harare to sort out Morton Jaffrey, and start managing Prince Edward so it supplies water every day, even if below maximum levels, instead of running it dry in a few months and then saying “sorry, no water”.
So the new dam is just one strand in a programme that requires Harare City Council, and the neighbouring urban councils, to fix their infrastructure, at least to 1990s levels with necessary extensions of the infrastructure for the new developments in the last 30 years.
In the meantime, President Mnangagwa, with his national borehole programme, has made sure Harare Province gets its share with major drilling programmes now in place in Epworth and Chitungwiza.The President is delivering and as usual when he went to Epworth at the weekend, he wanted to talk about what had just been done and went easy on the promises.
Online Reporter