Multi-Sectoral Approach Vital to End City's Water Woes
Source: The Herald (Harare)
Date: December 10, 2004
Author: Nelson Chenga
After spending years contributing to the choking of the Zimbabwean capital's main water supply reservoir with effluent, Harare residents are now paying dearly for their actions.
The Harare City Council currently spends more than three-quarters of its budget purifying the city's murky raw water at Lake Chivero, leaving it with very little to repair potholed roads and street lights, refuse collection, among other services.
"The city has the capacity to supply enough water but it cannot just pump water from the lake because it has to be purified first. "However, the council is unable to purify enough water due to the high costs involved in purchasing chemicals, hence the shortages," said one council official who chose to remain anonymous for professional reasons.
The Harare City Council now has to apply a cocktail of eight chemicals to rid the raw water of impurities that have turned the huge fresh water reservoir into several layers of hyacinth-covered smelly murk. An ever expanding population that has swelled to over two million over the years has increased pressure on the city's infrastructure with the sewerage reticulation system bursting its contents into streams supplying Lake Chivero as it fails to cope with the unprecedented strain.
The population has, among other things, also drastically reduced the council's capacity to provide enough clean water and collect garbage which continues to pile up at almost every street corner.
The city's Morton Jaffray water purification plant, currently operating at 65 percent of its full capacity, is producing about 600 megalitres of clean water daily against demand of over 700 megalitres.
Industries have also contributed in no small measure to poisoning the city's environment by clogging raw water supplies through the discharge of liquid waste into streams supplying Lake Chivero and polluting the air with noxious smoke from industrial processes.
According to environmentalists, "low awareness levels among the general populace and poor attitudes" have worsened the situation. In its 2004 trillion-dollar budget the council earmarked $815 billion for purchasing water purification chemicals, an amount that would soon be gobbled up, considering that it needs over $300 million per day.
Consequently, issues such as road maintenance, street lighting, housing and health, among others, have been largely neglected.
The council's capacity to meet its obligations is thus further heavily weighed down by huge defaults in payments for the minimal services it is offering its residents, commercial and industrial consumers. For example, several institutions in Harare owe the council over $37 billion, funds that could go a long way in alleviating some of the city's woes.
And establishing the link between the environment and the many problems facing Harare has been a complicated jig-saw puzzle that has taken years to piece together and it will take more years to convince many that they have indeed played a major role in creating Harare's problems.
It is, however, slowly dawning on some of the city's stakeholders that they must play their part to resolve the many pressing issues confronting Harare.
Environmentalists have established that for the city council to reduce its water purification bill raw water in its main supply reservoir should be cleaned. But this can only be achieved with the help of sound environmental practices by stakeholders upstream who include households and business establishments.
As some begin to realise that the socio-economic survival of the city hinges on setting out sustainable development goals, sound environmental management now appears to be a realistic target.
With fewer expenses to purify raw water for domestic and industrial consumption, more funds would be released for other needy areas such as housing and road maintenance.
In the hope of creating a brighter future for the city residents, business and the council are coming together to form unique partnerships as the concept of clusters takes root in Zimbabwe.
"The clusters share expertise and resources towards cleaner, healthier and more sustainable environment benefiting society at large and more importantly ensuring their own sustained production," says Environment Africa, the main driving force behind the green cluster concept.
"The development of these clusters has given rise to, for the first time, a real platform for local industry to apply the principles of international conventions (such as Agenda 21 of the Rio Convention) in a significant way with impact beyond their individual sites of operation," says Environment Africa.
The concept, successfully implemented in many developed countries which has taken more than a year to take root in Zimbabwe, seeks to bring together all stakeholders and challenge them to "take charge of their common environmental concerns such as reduced water and energy consumption and waste management".
In the long run it is hoped that everyone committed to contributing to a cleaner environment will embrace the "green cluster concept" for the survival of the city.
Ultimately, the Harare City Council will be able to meet its obligations and enable businesses to perform better.
With four clusters already in existence in Willowvale, Ardbennie, Southerton and Msasa industrial areas, many institutions are joining in and are slowly transforming their operations to align with this new thinking that seeks to lessen the negative impact on the environment and their socio-economic life.
"We have to adopt a culture of personal or corporate accountability; new communities and businesses must accept that there is no parent to look after us but we have stewardship for future generations," says Mr Andrew Gona, the business development manager of one of Zimbabwe's biggest cement manufacturing companies, Circle Cement.
Making the headlines some years back for polluting the city's environment through bad environmental practices, the cement company seems to have found new treasure from its waste dumps and has even started turning other people's waste products into profits.
"Business must be compatible with current economic reality: they must work financially, ecologically and socially," writes Gona in a document titled: "The Link Between Industrial Processes and Living Systems".
"All by-products of one system must become nutrients of another. We must adopt re-manufacturing and recycling strategies creating technical nutrients and thus reducing waste from discard.
"We must use innovation to depart from industrial age systems that follow a linear flow of extracting, producing, selling, using and discarding."
The result of this new vision has seen the company realise financial benefits amounting to more than $4,8 billion every year. Every year the cement manufacturer produces 270 000 tonnes of waste rock from mining operations, 180 tonnes refractory waste and between 150 and 200 tonnes of scrap metal.
The waste rock is turned into aggregates for the construction industry and agricultural lime and other companies take up refractory waste for recycling.
Scrap metal is also collected for recycling by scrap dealers and foundries.
Besides disposing most of its waste for its own benefit and for the benefit of other companies, the company is profitably using other companies' waste such as fly ash from power stations; tobacco waste and sawdust; blast furnace slug; synthetic gypsum; and calcium carbide sludge to improve its manufacturing processes and reduce costs. Circle Cement is also currently investigating the possibility of using tyre chips as an alternative source of fuel having successfully utilised tobacco waste and sawdust. Although the cement manufacturer is striving to make sustainable development an integral part of its business strategy by seeing opportunities in waste, their efforts need support from all other stakeholders.
For instance, the company's efforts to reduce the amount of dust released into the atmosphere are sometimes constrained by fluctuations in electric power supplies during load shedding.
The reduction is power supply decreases the efficiency of the process used to cut back the amount of dust emitted into the air.
In the spirit of sustainable development, problems facing the country's power utility as a stakeholder should also be addressed. The Zimbabwe Electricity Distribution Company is presently importing 35 percent of the country's total energy requirements. There are, however, plans to boost local power supply by expanding the Hwange and Kariba South power stations by 2008.