Online Reporter
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F Harare City Council officials are serious about protecting the lives of residents and seen to be providing some solutions, then they have to forego Christmas festivities to focus on solving the ecological disaster at Lake Chivero.
In the past weeks, animals and fish have been dying inexplicably at the lake, the major supplier of potable water to the capital.
City officials must now work extra hard to come up with answers to questions residents have been asking about this disaster. And there should be no time for festivities, considering the seriousness of the case, and the consequences of delaying to attend to it.
The near total breakdown in sewage treatment in Harare has to be fixed quickly and, from what we saw in the 1980s, this can be done, given the financing and the necessary competence in the Harare City Council.
The state of Lake Chivero has been getting steadily worse for over two decades, as Harare fails to cope with its sewage, allowing the treatment plants to decline through lack of maintenance and failing to add the new units at regular intervals, as the population grew.
Both maintenance and expansion should have been routine and the treated effluent flowing into Lake Chivero down the Mukuvisi and Marimba rivers continuing to meet the very high standards in the relevant legislation, being of aquarium quality, with very low nutrient levels and high oxygen levels.
But the 1980s engineering effort shows that the problem can be fixed quickly if city officials commit themselves.
It may well mean, considering the state of the Harare City Council at present, some sort of central Government control to oversee the refurbishment and expansion, or at least some sort of provincial authority being set up under the Central Government’s guidance for the metropolitan area.
The best solution could well be a new technically orientated authority to handle sewage treatment, and for that matter water treatment in Harare Metropolitan, since the city council, which is supposed to play the major role, has failed dismally at both.
Such a new authority would cover all four local authorities under the province.
With competent administration and proper collection of rates and fees, the sewage treatment mess can be fixed in very few years.
In the 1980s, the two main sewage treatment works in Harare were rebuilt using modern technology, and by rebuilt, we mean the old works at Firle and Crowborough had to be totally scrapped, with nothing carried over to the new works.
The city, under its first majority rule council, managed this major construction programme with little fuss and bother, although with determination and a strong administration.
Harare was smaller then, admittedly, but the council was able to finance and construct in very few years two completely new plants that handled almost all the city sewage.
A similar effort right now would see those two plants brought up to standard and the major expansions needed at both built and commissioned.
The effort and cost, per capita, would probably be less than what we saw in the 1980s since some of the work would involve refurbishing what was built then, rather than 100 percent new construction, although a lot of new work would be needed as the city is much larger.
This 1980s changeover solved the longstanding sewage treatment problem seen once Lake Chivero became the main water source for the city at the end of the 1940s.
Sewage treatment in those days involved a number of processes that eventually saw fairly clean water being discharged into rivers, but heavily laden with organic nutrients.
While Bulawayo decided to set up a separate water distribution system to pump this enriched water to sports fields, parks and the like, Harare continued to dump it into Manyame River, which was accepted when the main water supply was Seke Dam upstream of the outfall from the sewage treatment works.
When Lake Chivero was commissioned and became the main water source, the effluent continued being dumped into Mukuvisi, and this was better processed than is being dumped now, and, as the years passed, this caused problems in the lake with too much nutrient, especially in the dry seasons.
This speeded up the spread of weeds and caused the odd algae bloom, again not as bad as what we see now, but still undesirable.
New laws meant that such discharges were forbidden and the Harare City Council had to buy and lease farms to the south of the city, where the effluent was led, growing rich pastures that were used to sustain a large herd of beef cattle.
This was unsustainable and by the 1980s, a new solution was needed, hence the technology jump and the total rebuild.
Diverting effluent was getting harder. Sewage and effluent cannot be pumped uphill, hence the need for solutions at the existing works at the end of each major catchment and the need to have pure water entering Lake Chivero.
The solution did mean proper maintenance and routine expansion, which the 21st century opposition-led councils have dismally failed to do.
There is need to ensure that eventually all five river basins in the metropolitan area are served by modern treatment plants, hence the need for a super-authority to handle water supplies and sewage treatment.
