Zimbabwe Absurdity

Harare is running out of water. Municipal water supply in the suburbs is a best sporadic and a trickle. We leave a pipe from the lonely municipal supply tap into the swimming pool and it trickles in and just about keeps pace with evaporation. While it isn’t obviously polluted I wouldn’t be tempted to use it for anything except the pool and the garden.

Five years ago we got the water diviner in to site another borehole. The original hole had eventually run dry and buying in 5,000 litres of water twice a week was expensive. To be fair the diviner used both his bent brazing rods to divine then the science (electrodes and a sensor) and both indicated a new site which would not be prolific but should be reliable. The decision to go ahead was made and the drilling started. Breaks (water sources) were hit in three places around 40m and we told them to keep drilling. At 100m we called it a day – no more breaks had been found but what we had yielded at 1,000 litres per hour. Good enough for domestic purposes and keeping the flower beds and pots going. The lawn would have to look after itself.

The last two rainy seasons in Harare have been under the average despite being la Niña years. Parts of Zimbabwe did get heavy rains but they were very patchy. The borehole yield started to drop. We know this because the amps on the pump control box drops below six after an hour or so pumping, indicating the pump is starting to suck air.

We cannot just blame the sub-normal rains. There has been a lot of wetland development over the past several years. What rain falls now largely runs off instead of soaking in and replenishing the ground water. Whilst there are laws regulating development on wetlands they are now routinely flouted with the help of backhanders to the licensing authorities. It doesn’t help that there is now an official policy of condensing the urban population so formerly spacious one acre (and smaller) plots are being bought up and developed into high density cluster homes. Chinese are frequently behind this and will pay in cash – who in their right minds would refuse a suitcase of US$100 notes? Whilst the suburb in which we live has largely been spared, developers are starting to turn their attention to it and already construction has started on a plot five away from us.

We got into a routine of running the borehole for an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon. It seemed to cope. One morning last week I turned it on for an hour at breakfast time and then the gardener turned it on again without asking at 11. When I chanced to look at the amps when passing it read zero! Panic, the pump had run dry and over-heated the motor – it had cooked. A borehole specialist was called in. The good news was the motor was OK but the pipe in the hole had split due to being the wrong gauge and the power cable was too light for the power of the motor – 750W. It would all need replacing and in the meantime we only had the swimming pool as a supply.

Back in the early 1990s when working as a farm manager in the Chinhoyi area north west of Harare I was warned that a great way to start a nasty fight was to dispute water rights. Family, best friends – it could all turn nasty if water was at stake. Zimbabwe even has a water court to settle disputes and determine water rights.

The tenant in our cottage is not an easy person to get along with. We started out well so Marianne gave her a three year lease but since then she has become very demanding despite the lease agreement being specific on issues such as water usage. She is also a self-proclaimed expert on just about everything including solar power and, of course, boreholes. This means that I’ve been told that there’s plenty of water in the borehole, we won’t have to buy in water and the borehole will recover in the rains. This despite the presence of one of the strongest el Niños on record which inevitably means poor rains! Our relationship is fractious at best.

The borehole motor, pump and pipe (we used a smaller motor so the cable was still good to use) have been replaced and a smart controller installed that lets us calculate water flow into the hole – it’s about 80 litres an hour. It’s just a case of when it will run dry, not if. Then, like the majority of households in this city, we will have to rely on bought water of unknown quality – at the beginning of the year I spotted a water tanker filling from a roadside puddle. Quite where it will all come from I have no idea. Of course the current price of US$60 for 5,000 litres will soar and a sizeable proportion of those with good boreholes will continue to advertise it by watering the grass verges outside their property. The City Council has stated that this is illegal but who cares? Nobody seems to be checking and after all, they can be “persuaded” to turn a blind eye.