Water thieves cause council headcaches

Eight year-old Thembiso Sibotshiwe stands besides her stepmother in the middle of thorn scrub with a large plate dangling by her side, patiently waiting for a sufficient amount of water to accumulate under a punctured water pipe before she can scoop the liquid into a 20-litre plastic bucket.

She is part of a group of nine families living in a row of tiny shacks on a derelict plot of land along Airport Road whose only source of potable water is a hole crudely smashed in a supply pipe to a nearby residential suburb.

Each time council repairs the pipe, we look for another secluded section and break a hole to draw water, Bianca Sibotshiwe, the stepmother says, bending to scoop water into her container.

Sibotshiwe (33) admits puncturing holes into water supply pipes is illegal, but adds that her family and those of other women waiting their turn to fetch water from the artificial spring would go without water for domestic use if they relented.

We are careful to avoid being caught by municipal police who sometimes patrol this area and arrest us, Sigauke told The Zimbabwean.

Council officials say they are losing a lot of treated water due to an aging water reticulation system. The losses are aggravated by informal settlers in the city environs who deliberately perforate holes in transmission pipes.

Council loses an estimated 27 percent of treated water which it cannot account for once released from the treatment works, according to a study council commissioned water experts to carry out, city engineer Job Ndebele says.

The water purification capacity at the main Criterion Water Works from the citys five major supply reservoirs is pegged at 180 000 cubic metres a day. Daily consumption demand from the citys 1.5 million residents is estimated to exceed treatment capacity by close to 20 000 cubic metres a day.

The bulk is lost due to corroded pipes that need replacement owing to age and a substantial amount due to man-made leakages, he said adding: Council is battling to weed out informal settlements sprouting on council land to reduce the wastage.

You cannot recover the costs incurred in treating that water. As soon as a leaking section has been repaired and pipes replaced, the squatters perforate fresh holes in another section, the town engineer says.

Informal settlements sprang up as the urban poor abandoned lodgings in the working class suburbs, opting to put up collapsible shacks wherever they could to escape rising rentals as a result of inflation driven by a decade-long economic recession.

Factory closures drove national unemployment figures to about 90 percent with hundreds of retrenched workers pouring onto the streets as vegetable and fruit vendors without regular incomes.

Former security guard Mernard Kampango, 43, joined an informal settlement community near Killarney suburb on the western outskirts of the city three years ago. Like scores of other informal settlers and homeless vagrants he has survived by stealing water spurting out of a punctured pipe conveying supplies to a nearby gold mine and a university campus.

I cannot go back to lodgings in Pumula suburb where I rented a room and contributed towards water and electricity bills. I make a modest saving living here and fetching water from the bush, Kampango says

Not all informal settlers resort to drilling holes along water delivery pipes though.

Everisto Ncengani and neighbour Jokoniya Phiri set up thatched mud huts a few metres apart when they discovered water oozing out of a broken pipe outside Richmond suburb.

He discovered this small pool and invited me to set up home here, Ncengani, 58, says pointing to his colleague. We did not need to break a hole along the municipal water pipe.

Ward Three councillor, Milton Moyo says council has a long list of reported water leaks throughout the city but its major challenge is lack of resources and manpower in the citys engineering department.

We want to cut our losses given the magnitude of the water lost along transmission lines. The losses are unsustainable in terms of revenues lost but the engineering department has experienced serious losses of skilled manpower while council is constrained by lack of resources as well, Moyo told The Zimbabwean.