Gweru City Council mayor Martin Chivhoko has said the local authority has set targets to address water challenges bedevilling the city including perennial leakages that are affecting supply of the precious liquid to residents in its 2024 budget.
In an interview yesterday, Chivhoko said the city’s water pipes were obsolete and needed urgent replacement to avoid the continuous loss of treated water through leakages.
A 2018 service level benchmarking peer review report on the Midlands capital revealed that it was losing at least 57% of its treated water through burst pipes and leakages.
Chivhoko was elected mayor after the August 23 and 24 harmonised elections.
“In the 2024 budget we are prioritising the issue of increasing pumping capacity at Gwenhoro Dam and at the same time we want to reduce the loss of water through leakages,” he said.
“Our water pipes at Gwenhoro Dam need to be replaced as they are old because this has seen us losing a lot of treated water along the way.”
He said council will also resuscitate the reservoirs at Kopje so that residents can continue receiving water even if it stops pumping from the main water source.
In its 2020 report on water leakages in the city, council described the leaks as “seriously compromising” the pumpingof the precious liquid to all parts of the city.
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A 2019 service delivery probe team report, however, revealed that water leaks detection equipment donated three years earlier by the German Agency for International Co-operation and a local company Zimit was lying idle with the council engineering department failing to utilise it to curb water losses.
Meanwhile, Gweru United Progressive Residents and Ratepayers Development Association director David Chikore said council needed to set its priorities right as far as issues of service delivery were concerned.
“We honestly expect the council to attend to leaks timeously. Yes, all urban local authorities are facing financial difficulties but there are some issues that we expect them to address. It's a matter of setting priorities right,” he said.
According to the peer review committee, Gweru needed to modernise its water reticulation system to minimise leakages.
The committee also noted that the city will continue to incur labour, power, and water treatment costs if the problem is unresolved.
The review committee said council surpassed the water leaks acceptable levels by more than 50%, a situation that pointed to heavy loss of treated water in the city.
Meanwhile, Chivhoko said next year’s budget would be a static one which was informed by the need to lessen the burden on ratepayers. Council plans to maintain last year's U$S37 million budget.
