DETRACTORS of the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP) call it a pipe-dream, but is Phelekezela Mphoko about to make it a talking point again?
On his first public appearance in Bulawayo last month, the vice-president raised issues about it.
He then summoned former mayors and managers of the City of Bulawayo to a closed meeting during which water supply for the city was among the issues on the table.
While raising such welcome issues as revenue generation, calling for the return of the power station to the council and skylarking on the emotive vendor invasion of the city, he failed to sell to the city’s technocrats his idea that Bulawayo is today a ghost city because water was rationed to industry. This assertion proved how out of touch he is with reality of the city’s industrial life.
One of the realities – and they are too many to be enumerated – is the fact that, despite the fact the city is still to be paid for being forced to surrender its power utility to Zesa, Bulawayo administration’s headquarters was cut off from the power utility’s supply grid which Zesa grabbed from the council.
Apparently there is no law in this country that can compel Zesa to restore supply or pay the city council for the facility it grabbed.
The council has had to fall back on generators outside its administration complex for power.
The city’s water woes go back many years when it was decided to revive the call for the development of the MZWP as the only way out.
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Plans for this project had been gathering mothballs since 1912. The business community, notably led by Abe Menashe then mayor of Bulawayo, raised colossal sums of money towards the project at a time when the Zimbabwean dollar was still stronger than the British pound.
The project hit its first major snag in 1992, a crippling drought year when the government announced its public rejection of the project.
At a Frontline State, meeting in Kasane, a white civil servant from the Water Resources ministry and Development shocked the city when he announced that the people of Bulawayo were misguided by demanding implementation of the proposed project.
“How can they demand water from the Zambezi when there are numerous dam sites around the city waiting to be developed?” the official said. Up until then governments had the project scheduled for completion ahead of the just completed Tokwe-Mukosi Dam in Masvingo.
Of profound public interest in Bulawayo was an expected announcement that the government was ready to work with the city to develop the dam sites announced in Kasane. But no such announcement was forthcoming and government officials took to describing the MZWP as a pipe-dream.
The Kasane meeting had been called to consider, among other issues, an application by the white government in South Africa to draw water from Kazangula for its north-western region.
The application was turned down despite South Africa’s offer to build a pipeline from Francistown to Bulawayo to save the city. This forced Bulawayo to construct in a hurry a pipeline from the Nyamandlovu aquifer.
By the way the use of borehole water has been described by the United Nations as suitable only for rural development.
The decision to turn down South Africa’s application was occasioned by the Frontline States commitment to confrontation with the white-ruled republic.
At that very moment South had decided to release late Nelson Mandela from prison, preparing the ground for the country’s transition to majority rule.
But the hardline stance taken by Zimbabwe at Kasane was in fact, a policy designed to deny Bulawayo and Matabeleland the human right which is water. While talking about dam sites around the city the government proved to be only paying lip service to this cause.
Zimbabwe’s rejection of South Africa’s offer to build a pipeline to Bulawayo as part of Kazungula concession demonstrated how determined the government of Zimbabwe was to remain rigid even when South Africa had answered an “SOS” from the beleaguered city.
But by 1992 the Frontline States should have been ready to give South Africa the Zambezi River water because Mandela’s release from prison was already being negotiated behind closed doors and the republic’s neighbours knew about it.
They should have been willing to expedite his release by co-operating with their hated neighbour.
But hardliners led by Zimbabwe were not having it even though Bulawayo, now in the grip of a crippling drought in living memory and was dying, stood to gain from granting South Africa water rights of the Zambezi, most of which belongs to Zambia anyway.
It has been suggested that heads of Frontline States could not have been aware of Mandela’s impending release. This suggestion should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. Leaders of the Frontline States are not a bunch of tyros to have been unaware of these developments.
One of the most exciting assignments ever to come my way during 18 years of my employ with The Chronicle newspaper was the annual production of a supplement to coincide with the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair.
The 1992 edition – all 88 pages of – it took me to Masvingo where the Mutirikwe Dam had only enough water for less than 10 months of supply near the dam wall.
This was probably the driest season since the construction of the dam to provide water for sugarcane production in Triangle and the town of Fort Victoria decades before.
I was greatly flattered every year to be pulled away from my desk as senior assistant editor to compile the supplement.
From Masvingo I went to Mutare where the city was equally in the grip of drought and there were screaming calls for taping of the Pungwe River waters to the Christmas Pass treatment works.
Although the Osborne Dam on Odzi River a stone’s throw away, had been completed, the Osborne was developed for sugar plantations in the Chisumbanje valley.
If you are a water fanatic that I am, you want to visit the Pungwe Elbow from where Mutare gets its water through a 58km pipeline that in one section goes through a mountain for 4km.
In one place the pipeline barely by passes a grave, no more than 30cm away, a rare surveying and engineering feat. In another section, to make way for the pipeline, a massive Msasa tree was dug up roots and all to be planted on another site.
Water from the Pungwe Elbow- Christmas Pass pipeline flows all the way to the treatment works without being pumped. I once sat on the banks of the Congo River in Brazzaville for hours watching that African water wonder flow to the sea.
May be I dropped a tear dreaming about what could be done with all that water in dry Africa. I can be very emotional where water is concerned.
In Marondera, the town had its own peculiar water shortage problem with disease in the air as clogged sewers spewed untreated human waste in the centre of housing estates.
The scoop of my assignment came from the Water ministry where late Joseph Msika was the sitting minister. He announced that active government plans for water development included a pipeline to run from Kariba to Kudu in the Kadoma district. This project would be extended along the railway line to Ncema Dam.
This is one of Bulawayo’s condemned catchment areas whose capacity has been reduced drastically by the vagaries of nature, helped by uncontrolled gold panning in surroundings and the catchment of other council dams in the Esigodini district.
From Harare I drove to Kariba, stopping briefly at Chinhoyi where there was no crisis, and then on to Kariba to spend my employers money and feed my eyes on the dam’s waters, the greatest man-made water body, and take pictures.
This was the drawpoint for the proposed pipeline that might provide relief to Bulawayo if ever it went all the way to Ncema.
Although, the government will not admit it, it is a fact that development of the Kariba-Kudu pipeline is still actively being pursued.
During the last two years the Kudu Dam site has been honoured with a visit by former Vice-President Joice Mujuru twice, not as a tourist attraction.
The extension of the pipeline to Ncema Dam remains a sop that government knows cannot be sustained politically without risking a backlash from the people of Matabeleland.
Government plans for water development are therefore, all wrong, being driven by ethnic considerations and the government’s perceived source of political power.
Email jkmaphenduka @ gmail. com. Cell: 263 772 332 404
