ZIMBABWE/ZAMBIA-WATER: Industries Dry Up

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru and Joe Chilaizya

HARARE, Nov 22 1995 (IPS) - Acute water shortages threaten two of Southern Africa’s main industrial centres, the Zambian copperbelt city of Ndola and Bulawayo in neighboring Zimbabwe, with both being forced to introduce rationing.

In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, industries have been allotted only three-quarters of their average water use. “This amount is not enough for running industry,” said a spokesman at the Matabeleland Chamber of Industries.

The scarcity has forced at least one company, a towelling manufacturer, to relocate 50 percent of its operations across the border to Francistown, Botswana.

Only two firms, the meat processing Cold Storage Company and Bulawayo Abbatoirs have been exempted from the tight water restrictions.

The rest, including the leather, textile, food and beverage industries, the backbone of the city’s industrial sector, have been denied concessions by local authorities.

“The situation is serious but there is no panic yet,” said Eric Bloch, an economist and a leading water campaigner for the city, 430 kms southwest of the capital Harare, and its 600,000 population.

Similarly in Ndola, the heart of Zambia’s copper, textile and engineering industries, some firms have not had water supplies for the past three weeks. While there is talk of forced closures, others are considering moving out.

Zambia Telecommunications Limited (ZAMTEL), the country’s sole telecommunications company, confirmed to IPS that it was shifting its head office from Ndola to the capital Lusaka, 360 kms south.

Town clerk Emmanuel Chenda fears that ZAMTEL’s move may open the way for other companies to quit the city of about 800,000 people.

“We may witness the death of a city in the very near future if the situation persists,” he said.

The two cities are victims of a decade of poor rains which has affected the entire southern African region, whose rivers and dams are drying. While Ndola and Bulawayo are in difficulty now, cities in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa will face water shortages within 30 years, the U.N. Development Programme predicts.

Bulawayo’s woes however are not only related to the climate, Ndebele politicians from the area claim. Ethnic politics also plays a role and as a minority group they are neglected in development plans by a Shona-dominated government, they argue.

In 1983, Bloch, himself from Bulawayo, stunned delegates at a Harare water conference when he said: “nothing will be done until three million Shonas, or the president, are relocated to Bulawayo.” The Shona, president Robert Mugabe’s ethnic group, make up 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s 10.4 million people.

For years, Bulawayo has pinned its faith on a long-proposed 450 kms pipeline to tap the waters of the Zambezi river to the north. Activist Arnold Payne, and many a Bulawayo resident, accuses the government of misplaced priorities by refusing to allocate funds for the project.

To emphasise his point, Payne pushed a wheelbarrow with an empty water drum from Bulawayo to Harare in September to coincide with the high-profile All-Africa Games, and then left it parked outside parliament.

Dismissing the criticism, the minister of Lands and Water Resources, Kumbirai Kangai, said funds had not been allocated for the proposed pipeline because a feasibility study to determine its cost has not been completed.

Currently Kenneth Small of the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Trust is working on plans for the pipeline and dam system with targeted off take facilities for urban, industrial, mining and agricultural usage.

The present water resources system for Bulawayo is primarily based on five dams, 50-80 kms southeast of the city. The catchment areas for the dams is small, ranging from 36-1600 sq kms, and is now insufficient.

“This system performed well during the period of good rains through the later part of the 1970’s,” Small points out. “However it has proved inadequate to the growing water requirement of the city with the coming of the dry years starting in 1983.”

Small said there had been no new major water supply built for Bulawayo in the last 20 years, excepting a pipeline for tapping one of the dams on an emergency basis.

ZIMBABWE/ZAMBIA-WATER: Industries Dry Up

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru and Joe Chilaizya

HARARE, Nov 22 1995 (IPS) - Acute water shortages threaten two of Southern Africa’s main industrial centres, the Zambian copperbelt city of Ndola and Bulawayo in neighboring Zimbabwe, with both being forced to introduce rationing.
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