The Bulawayo City Council said that it will continue to maintain the 72-hour water-shedding programme, amid indications that the city is left with just six months’ supply of water.
The Sunday News reported City of Bulawayo spokesperson, Nesisa Mpofu, as saying the city’s water supply dams are less than 50% full at a time when water consumption is very high. She said:
As we speak our dams are 45,19 percent full which means we are way below half and it is a critical time largely because we are in the hot season where consumption is bound to increase, so we are also calling on stakeholders to continuously conserve water.
From what we have seen, unfortunately, we have to maintain the water shedding because our dam levels are low.
We also have to be mindful that occasionally we do have electricity outages and when those occur, they affect our water provision services and as such you realise that water shedding schedules are affected meaning that other areas can go for more than the current schedule without water.
We also have challenges of pipe bursts, if we have a burst pipe within an area we have to shut down the whole system for the whole area until we resolve the problem.
As of Friday, 17 November, Insiza was at 60.07 percent, Inyankuni 32.93 percent, Lower Ncema at 31.72 percent, Umzingwane at 4.13 percent, Upper Ncema at 22.35 percent and Mtshabezi at 74.51 percent.
The chairperson of the Future Water Supplies and Water Action committee, Clr Edwin Ndlovu said:
The situation is very bad, so we need short-term, medium-term and long-term plans to solve the problem.
We have proposed as council to have another dam that can complement these other dams and there is a proposal of Glass Block Dam in Insiza which could provide about 70 percent of our water requirements as a city.
Government has expressed that it is already committed to the Lake Gwayi-Shangani project and as such cannot divert funds but we are saying we can bring in private players such as banks who are ready to do so and help construct the Glass Block Dam.
Meanwhile, Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development Minister, Anxious Masuka recently admitted that the Lake Gwayi-Shangani construction was behind schedule.
Speaking last Friday at the unveiling of a 20-member Bulawayo Water Technical Committee that was established by the Government to oversee the rapid improvement of water and sanitation services in Bulawayo over a 100-day period, Masuka said:
Lake Gwayi-Shangani is now slightly behind schedule but we do hope to complete this project in the new year, the contracts for the pipeline have now been awarded, the contracts for the pumps for the various stations have also been awarded.
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