Nobody believes the lies any more

empty, and the supplies are steadily shrinking.
Unless the government builds a pipeline to bring fresh water from the Zambezi River 200 km to the west, its taps will eventually run dry.
More than 1,5 million people now live in Bulawayo, which was little more than a sparsely populated city when Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980.
The country’s second capital was deliberately sited close to the watershed dividing the headwaters of river tributaries forming part of the Zambezi River system to the North and the Limpopo River system to the South, which contains a vast reservoir of fresh water.
Over the past 27 years the tributaries have supplied Bulawayo’s inhabitants with drinking water.
The problem is, Bulawayo was only planned to be a small town of 500,000 inhabitants but growth has been rapid and largely unplanned. It is now five times larger and the reservoirs supplying it are rapidly drying up.
While water still runs for most of the time in the taps of the wealthy suburbs, it is in chronically short supply in the dusty shantytowns where most of Bulawayo’s population lives. Successive droughts since the 1992 dry spell and takeover of water supplies by quasi’government body ZINWA have destroyed the fragile livelihoods of the marginalized Ndebele people who form the backbone of Bulawayo’s 1,5 million population
Huge areas of shanty dwellings clustered around the second capital have no running water, no mains electricity and their homes ‘ built out of wrecked cars, tyres, cardboard boxes and anything else they could find – have been wrecked during the brutal army-led Operation Murambatsvina.
Mkhululi, a 28 year old unemployed man who lives in Makokoba, one of the shanty ghettos of the poor city, is incensed that he has to spend his limited cash on buying water.
“Buying a bucket of water to wash clothes and for the family to wash is mad, especially for someone who’s unemployed,” Mkhululi said.
The irony is that these slum dwellers who are forced to buy water by the bucket from mule and donkey carts have to pay up to 15 times more for the life giving liquid than the residents of Bulawayo’s middle class suburbs who enjoy the luxury of uninterrupted piped water.
With residents unable to afford enough water to perform their daily ablutions, diarrhoea epidemics periodically hit the shanty suburbs. These can prove fatal for the young and the very old. In certain areas, cholera outbreaks occur.
The state water company ZINWA only allows water to run through the taps for two hours each day, if residents are lucky.
Things are so bad in Bulawayo that water has to be transported by water bowsers.
World Vision Zimbabwe, an international charity organization, has been helping Bulawayo to sink new boreholes in various ghettos. Water experts here said to date, a total of 80 boreholes sunk 50 metres deep have been equipped with hand pumps and an additional 50 are to be equipped with hand pumps by World Vision Zimbabwe. Another 56 boreholes require to be fitted with bush pump components.
The government has long lied that the government was moving to draw water from the Zambezi River in an ambitious project that usually springs up in the run up to national elections. But nobody here believes the lies anymore. – Chief reporter