The ManicaPost
Abel Zhakata Senior Reporter
LOCAL authorities are failing to provide adequate clean drinking water to households because residents are not paying bills, a situation that has crippled service delivery, a Cabinet minister has said.
Addressing delegates who attended the Water and Sanitation Service Level Benchmarking launch in Mutare last week, the Minister of Environment, Water and Climate, Cde Saviour Kasukuwere, said prepaid water meters would salvage the problem.
He said residents were wasting money on luxuries and spending thousands on cell phones and airtime without paying anything to municipalities for water.
Cde Kasukuwere said it was not true that people were hard-pressed to the extent of failing to pay water bills because they were spending more on luxuries which are not basic to human life.
“These people are buying cell phones, using lots of money on airtime talking to their girlfriends and they tell us that they do not have money to pay for water.
“No, they should not pay for the water because it is their human right, but they should pay for the service.
“That service has resulted in them having water coming out of their taps. What happens is that when they don’t pay, councils fail to provide water and they then cry foul without knowing that they are the ones who caused the problem.
“Prepaid meters are the way to go. You have my support on that one. Go to tender and install the prepaid meters and we ensure that everyone pays,” Cde Kasukuwere said.
Water, he said, plays a pivotal role in the economy of the country.
“As a Government and ministry we are already in the process of implementing various pronouncements of the National Water Policy such as the establishment of commercial water supply and sanitation utilities.
“We are alive to the nexus of water, the economy and the health of its people and the challenges we are facing.
“Guided by Zim-Asset, we a reworking round the clock to address these challenges with full participation of all stakeholders,” he said.
Speaking at the same function, the Minister of Local Government, National Housing and Public Works, Dr Ignatius Chombo, said all local authorities would in future be required to produce long-term water production master plans to ensure that infrastructure development matches water availability and curbs current shortages facing many municipalities.
He said water was a key deliverable that was getting scarcer in most urban authorities.
Dr Chombo said the benchmarking exercise was introduced on the backdrop of serious deterioration of municipal services during the 2000 to 2009 era when the country was faced by economic decline.
“This led to failure to sustain investments as municipal revenues were eroded by inflation,” he said.
“The situation that obtained should be a thing of the past as most urban areas did not receive water for days without seeing a drop from their taps. Very few, if any, sewerage treatment works were working, with the majority of treatment ponds practically abandoned. Sewer flows on the streets had become a common sight. It took long to remove sewage flows from the streets. Refuse collection is still erratic, inconsistent and infrequent, while littering and pollution of the environment seems to be continuing.”
The Service Level Benchmarking, (SLB) he said, is thus one of the tools required to monitor and support recovery efforts in service delivery.
“Thus in the context of urban councils management in Zimbabwe, SLB can be defined as the process of determining how efficiently and effectively councils are delivering services as well as efforts that councils are making to improve the mobilisation of own resources, and to measure whether these resources are being utilised in an optimum manner or not,” he said.
