Frequent power cuts running into several hours per day are damaging water pumps at Bulawayo’s supply dams and worsening acute shortages of the commodity blamed on the 2024 El Nino-induced drought that ravaged the country, mayor David Coltart (pictured) has warned.
The Zimbabwe Power Company is failing to generate enough electricity to meet demand due to depressed generation capacity, resulting in rolling outages.
Unlike in previous years, power utility Zesa Holdings has not provided a timetable for load-shedding, and this hàs left individuals and businesses counting the costs of regular and intermittent power cuts.
In Bulawayo, the power cuts are worsening the city’s already dire water situation as they not only disrupt water treatment works, but also lead to the damaging of critical pumps.
Coltart said the local authority had on several occasions engaged Zesa seeking to have the water treatment plants spared from load-shedding without success.
“If you go to Ncema, we have huge pumps there. They are not like your little borehole pumps that you can just turn on and off,” the mayor said in an interview.
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“We have been pleading with Zesa to say before you load-shed, tell us so that we can switch our pumps off, instead they just switch off without warning.”
He said council wanted Zesa to spare the city’s waterworks from load-shedding to ensure uninterrupted supplies to residents as well as the power utility and other businesses.
“Their unscheduled power cuts are damaging some of our pumps, and even when you have got water, we still have Zesa problem,” Coltart said.
“We are trying to get solar pump plants down at Ncema so that we can rely on solar power instead of depending on Zesa to run those pumps, but that cannot be done overnight.”
The local authority and Zesa were once at loggerheads over unexplained bills, resulting in the former turning to diesel generators for its main office in the central business district.
Bulawayo residents are going for days without water following the decommissioning of two supply dams last year after they ran dry.
The rains received to date have offered some hope that the situation at the city’s supply dams might improve, but indications from council show that the inflows have been very minimal.
Last year, the municipality appealed to the government to declare the city a water crisis area to enable the council to look for outside funding to undertake short-to-medium term interventions to alleviate the challenges.
However, the government turned down the request and instead, appointed a technical committee to undertake a research on how to address the water crisis.
The technical committee has failed to come up with interventions to address the city’s water crisis.