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In those areas, the situation is the same as in other poor rainy seasons experienced in the region off and on in the past many years. Looking back, we find that in virtually the same region, including particularly the Hwange and the Binga sectors of Matabeleland North, there have been many poor rainy seasons since about 1880.
These poor seasons resulted in extreme famine in 1882-83, in 1887-88, in 1889-90, in 1896-97 in 1903-04, in 1912-13, in 1916-17, in 1922-23, 1927-28, in 1933-34, 1942-43, 1945-46, the catastrophic 1946-47 season, in 1982-83, in 1991-92 and the patchy rains experienced from then by some Zimbabwean provinces since 2000 up to now.
A wider glance at the region generally called Southern Africa shows us that there have been more or less cyclical patterns of good and poor rainy seasons during that period.
The patterns are characterised by local anomalies that resulted in one particular area, the Lake Malawi drainage basin as well as Southern Tanzania, becoming wetter in the 1961-90 period.
Meanwhile, the Matabeleland-Masvingo-Midlands-Manicaland climato-ecological region had eight seasons with below average rainfall in the 30 years from 1960-1990.
While some parts of Southern Africa are becoming wetter, larger chunks of the region are getting relatively drier.
These include the Matabeleland, Masvingo, Manicaland, and Midlands sectors in Zimbabwe.
In the neighbouring states, southern Mozambique, western Zambia, south-eastern Angola, northern, western and central
Botswana are becoming drier, and so are parts of South Africa’s Limpopo and North-Western provinces. This climatic change has implications of three types: economic, social and ecological.
Lack or shortage of water has well known adverse effects on various economic sectors including agriculture. Most of the extractive or tertiary industrial sector uses water for its operations, especially the textile and milling-associated industries.
Most industrial equipment uses water and so do service industries such as hotels, lodges and facilities owned and run by those service providers. The facilities include swimming pools and aquariums.
Water plays a most important part in the construction industry, in the building of residential, commercial, industrial and sports facilities and even that of roads and of course, cultural infrastructure such as churches and mosques.
What this means is that the larger a nation’s population gets, the larger the quantity of water it utilises and consumes.
This is an important demographic aspect of this problem that Zimbabwe’s policy generators need to consider seriously.
Hospitals and schools in Zimbabwe are currently, by and large, short of water, to say nothing about virtually all of the country’s urban communities.
It is quite clear that the solution to this problem is now less in the sky than in the ground. Zimbabwe must search for solutions for its water shortage for its various needs deep down in its diverse geological formations, in its “bowels”.
The nation should take a leaf from a report issued recently by a United Kingdom company of hydrologists on the existence of massive quantities of underground water in Tunisia and other North African desert countries.
The report strongly recommends that those nations should sink boreholes and use the water that was trapped below the desert for millennia and millennia for land reclamation and other purposes.
We know that many parts of Zimbabwe, particularly the drought-prone regions, are sitting on perennial aquifers. If these are exploited, sustainable agriculture can be developed and the region’s ecosystem can also be more or less protected from destruction by drought.
Presently, it is risky to embark on commercial agriculture on a large scale in that region on the basis of rain water. The suggestion to “go down” for our national water requirements does not mean or imply shelving the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project.
The advantage of “going down” for our water is that we do not have to negotiate with or consult any other nation to do it.
Currently, Zimbabwe and Zambia jointly manage Zambezi River water through the Zambezi River Authority. The two-nation body works jointly to collect hydrological data for determining the release of water through the turbines at the Kariba Dam.
The Zambezi River Authority took over the role of the Central African Power Corporation which played an important role in the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953.
The water of the Zambezi River is, however, of much interest to other states such as Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa and strangely, even Tanzania.
In 1987, this group of Zambezi riparian nations created what they named the Zambezi Action Plan (Zacplan). Its objective was a proposal to institute what the plan termed environmental impact assessments of all development projects within that river basin.
Incidentally, the Zambezi River’s total catchment area is 1 290 000 square kilometres.
International interest is shown by the fact that it is planned to construct dams along the waterway at Mupata Gorge, Batoka Gorge, Baroma, Lupata, Devil’s Gorge, Katombora and at Mapanda Uncua.
Presently, the river has only two dams, the Kariba and the Caborra Bassa.
While the process of getting a pipeline to run to Bulawayo from that river is slowly going on, it is advisable for every municipal ward to “go down” for subterranean water.
That means councillors and MPs, chiefs, headmen, village heads and district administrators would do the nation a great deal of good by at least identifying where boreholes or wells can be sited.
*Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734328136 or email [email protected]
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