MUTARE– City authorities are reluctant to roll out plastic taps and address huge water losses amounting to almost half the volume pumped out into the municipality system.
It has emerged that despite successfully implementing a pilot infrastructure replacement project to upgrade dilapidated water infrastructure, causing bulk physical losses, council is somehow reluctant for a full-scale roll out in Sakubva.
Addressing delegates during a Transparency International Zimbabwe (TIZ) dialogue on service delivery, city Engineer Maxwell Kerith, failed to fully explain why council has not rolled out the project with a ninety percent success rate.
Kerith revealed that while council has lowered non-revenue water from sixty eight percent and is now billing 52% of treated water, forty eight percent is still being lost to illegal connections, land barons and physical losses.
“Non-revenue water was at 68 percent 2017, we have measured for 2020 we are now at 48 percent of non-revenue water. It’s still not acceptable as we have set ourselves a high standard for ourselves to achieve the recommended 25 percent.
“We have a challenge in Sakubva in terms of culture, Mercy Corps partnered council sometime to assist and replaced old taps, but less than five years down the line the taps are damaged again and nobody cares.
“Last year we procured ten plastic taps and we installed them as pilot to see how it goes. Nine of those are still there so we are tempted to say that plastic taps can be a solution to the physical losses.
“We should be rolling out a comprehensive program for Sakubva soon,” he said.
TIZ programs manager, Tafadzwa Chikumbu said while council is losing revenue its failings are felt everyday by residents and ratepayers.
He said local government must uphold principles of good governance, follow due diligence in procurement.
“Good governance is one key pillar for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in fact development outcomes in any respect are related to institutional governance. Local authorities are close to the people and their impacts and failures can be easily recognized, people interact with the services on a daily basis.
“There are issues of water billing system, potential leakage because of poor water billing or a poor water management system that has perpetuated, and the question is how can we quantify how much council has lost over time.
“Council is losing money pout of the things that it can manage for itself,” he said.
Eng. Kerith says council has learnt its lessons and is turning a new page.
He said council has a cocktail of measures it has adopted to manage water, including setting up of separate metering zones, purchase and installation bulk water meter (worth US$1.2 million) to track losses.
Eng Kerith said council also introduced a stepped up tariff regime to deal with general abuse of water in the city, where water barons have emerged.
“We needed to makes sure we were able to measure what we were putting in the system we replaced our bulk meters at a cost of US$1,7 million and we now know exactly what is coming into the system.
“We are working on our reservoirs and we will introduce a district metering area (DMA) system so that we have a system that can be able to split from physical losses, theft or billing errors,” he said.
“We introduced a step up to deal with water barons, besides the step up tariffs we are also moving in gradually to replace obsolete water meters, so far we have replaced 300 meters for our top customers.”
Hot on the hills of completing an outstanding audit process, which conferred credit worthiness to the municipality, council is already seeking to borrow the US$300 000 required to finish off the Dangamvura water project.
Eng. Kerith said council needs to borrow these funds, as a supplement to financing from the ZimFund facility administered by the African Development Bank (ADB), as it is currently hamstrung due to viability challenges.
He said population and city growth increased raw water demand in excess of the capacity of Pungwe and Odzani, indicating that council is now looking at another ambitious project to get water from Osborne Dam.
“Since 2017 we have never borrowed money because council was in arrears, for council to borrow it must get power which are subject to us being audits. We are now up to date in our audits, we have cleared our audit reports for the last five years.
“Government is now satisfied that we can now borrow. Going forward we are hoping that by April will raise the money, which is some of the money that is indicated on the notice, which is around USD$300 000,00 at the official rate.
“We are borrowing this money to finish off works and recapitalize,” said Eng. Kerith.
