The ManicaPost
Post Correspondent
DESTINY of Africa Network has set-up a 50 000-litre water facility to enable the organisation to complete its Dora Plot 1 project.
The move comes after Mutare City Council’s failure to connect them to the main pipeline citing lack of capacity.
Mutare mayor, Councillor Tatenda Nhamarare said: “It is not feasible for us to connect new areas to the Dangamvura main pipeline until we complete the upgrade.”
Cllr Nhamarare, however, said Mutare City Council was supporting the initiative in which the private land developer was providing borehole water to its clients.
“We are working well with Destiny so that the water will be clean and safe,” the mayor said.
Cllr Nhamarare could, however, not say when the water upgrade will be completed, but the decision had pulled the carpet from under the feet of 876 DANet clients who are expected to move into their stands in the near future.
Council previously lost more than $300 000 in a botched deal in which it contracted an organisation that lacked capacity to replace the 15mm pipe with a 45mm to meet the sprawling suburb’s demands.
DANet Mutare projects chairperson, Mr Wilson Masokowere, said they had resolved not to wait for the council to connect them to the main pipeline as it had no time-line for its completion and was expected to cost the cash-strapped local authority $1 million which could keep their over 1 600 clients waiting indefinitely.
“We have completed most of the work for people to move in and council even issued us with a certificate of partial completion, but council could not allow our clients to move in without water which they could not themselves provide leading us to take the initiative to provide the water,” said Mr Masokowere.
Mr Masokowere said they were expecting to complete tarring the other part of the area to allow a further 800 clients to also move in by the end of August.
“Tarring of the other area should be done by end of next month and the other half would be free to move in,” he said.
DANet has over 5 000 more residential stands, schools, shopping malls and a hotel planned for construction over three phases around the area which water connectivity had threatened to stall the projects.
While the city boasts of having the cleanest water among all municipal towns across the country, the broke eastern border city is struggling with distribution of a resource which it draws from more than 90 kilometres away from Pungwe River and 35 kilometres off from Odzani and Smallbridge dams.
The Pungwe water project was commenced in the mid-1990s with Alderman Lawrence Mudehwe as executive mayor. It was completed at the turn of the millennium and was valued at $1 billion through a loan of which the bulk come from Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) a Swedish government aid organisation.
Ironically even after the water was within the city it could not on its own distribute the water throughout the city until again the cholera epidemic triggered donor sympathy which culminated in the completion of the 10-million cubic litre tank with a capacity to supply 60 percent of the city’s over 200 000 residents.
While the city is expected to complete the water distribution there is mounting pressure from Government for council to repay the Pungwe project loan, with Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Local Government Minister Cde Saviour Kasukuwere chiding it for failing to pay back the loan earlier this year.
