The Harare Residents’ Trust (HRT) has visited communities that experienced devastating floods, in Kuwadzana Paddocks and Budiriro where the victims of the floods settled where they should not have been allocated residential stands in the first instance.
Wetlands are being destroyed in most communities, with corrupt councillors, council district officials, town planners and political party leaders conniving with land barons to unprocedurally conduct land sales targeting wetlands, recreational and other open spaces.
Land barons take advantage of desperate homeseekers and mislead them into illegal occupation of council and state land.
The heavy rains that have fallen in Harare have exposed the corrupt for selling people residential stands on the natural paths of water.
The people who have settled on these wetlands and the sellers involved are equally culpable.
There is no way that water will change its natural course without bothering the illegally settled.
A sustainable solution is urgently needed for Zimbabwe to address housing shortages and the preservation of wetlands.
The HRT, through its community structures, has over the years observed the accelerated parceling out of council and state land, especially wetlands, under circumstances inconsistent with the provisions of the Regional, Town and Country Planning Act (Chapter 29.12), Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29.15), Environment Management Act (Chapter 20.27) and council by laws and regulations.
City of Harare paddocks bordering Mufakose, Crowborough, Budiriro and Kuwadzana suburbs have been invaded and occupied by residents led by elected officials, land barons and council bureaucrats.
Some of the people are given the land during election campaign periods in return for votes.
Every rainy season the residents who illegally settled on these wetlands experience flooding, and they lose thousands of United States dollars’ worth of their personal possessions like furniture, clothes and food.
A six-year-old child lost life in Budiriro 5 following a heavy downpour of rains.
Bernard Musarurwa, a local government critic and roads engineer said it was unfortunate that the City of Harare has allowed the privatisation of the land used for the treatment of effluent from the treatment of sewage by watering cattle pastures, which have been turned into residential developments.
Victims of flooding from the Kuwadzana side of Paddocks area were temporarily sheltered at Kuwadzana 2 Primary School while those affected by flooding in Budiriro were housed at Budiriro 3 Primary School.
Similarly, the effluent from the Mabvuku sewerage treatment ponds 2 used to be pumped across the Harare- Mutare Road to pastures at Venterburg, adjacent to the National Oil Infrastructure Company (NOIC) depot.
A commercial farmer kept a large herd of cattle.
The key question that begs a deeper analysis and investigation is what happens now to the effluent given that the pastures are no longer available.
People now occupy a significant portion of the council paddocks.
Through these environmentally unfriendly policies, the City of Harare has been shortchanging itself by destroying the pastures needed for further purification of the effluent from the sewerage treatment plants.
The HRT is not hesitant to, therefore, suggest that the City of Harare has been leading in the discharge of untreated sewer into the streams and rivers that lead to Lake Chivero, worsening the water treatment situation for Harare.
This reveals that cattle pastures, which have been converted to residential areas will continue to be flood areas because they were already water pathways before they were converted.
Land barons and the corrupt involved in land sales are taking advantage of Section 74 of the constitution of Zimbabwe.
Upon selling land through illegal means, they urge their victims, the buyers to quickly build their houses, knowing that once a structure has been put up and people are living there, it would be legally difficult to remove them from the wetland.
People are deliberately abusing an otherwise progressive constitutional safeguard against abuse of the homeless.
Council is in acting in cahoots with the illegal settlers in that its building inspectors do inspections during construction and they approve the illegal structures well knowing that they are built on illegally allocated land.
Some reports indicate that the council has been collecting rates and rentals from these areas.
Section 74 speaks to the freedom from arbitrary eviction.
It states that: “No person may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances.”
This apparent abuse of the law is giving way to the willful violation of key town planning legislation and regulations, thus compromising on service delivery, especially housing provision.
These violations have compromised the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG Six (water and sanitation), SDG Three (health) and SDG Four (education).
Wetlands should be protected without fear or favour.
All development should be undertaken in the spirit of sustainable land usage. -HRT