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Yeukai Karengezeka Herald Correspondent
Residents have blasted Harare City Council (HCC) for failing to adequately address water and sanitation issues in hotspot suburbs where water-borne disease outbreaks have become frequent.

Such areas include Glen View, Glen Norah and Budiriro where more than 40 cases of diarrhoea have been recorded since last week.

According to the city’s health services director, Dr Prosper Chonzi, a 24-hour rapid response team has already been deployed in the affected areas, but is yet to establish whether the outbreak is related to cholera or typhoid or not.

Harare Residents Trust (HRT) director Mr Precious Shumba said council was reluctant to solve issues of availability of clean water and repeated sewer bursts.

“As HRT we have noted that the City of Harare lacks the capacity and the willpower to pursue solutions proffered by residents and their technical people,” he said. “We are concerned that lives are lost and they do not learn from history and come up with substantive interventions.”

Mr Shumba said the local authority was supposed to replace the old water and sewer pipes as a long-term measure to prevent out- breaks

“By substantive interventions we mean the City of Harare needs to deal directly with houses that were built on top of water and sewerage pipes,” he said. “They need to address the issue of water supply and sewer bursts that occur repeatedly.

“That means they have to replace the underground sewer pipes as a matter of priority because we are now aware Glen View and Budiriro are hotbeds of these medieval diseases.”

In an interview, the city’s acting director for water, Engineer Mabhena Moyo, said council was working to address the matter.
“The problem has been repeated sewer bursts in the hotspot areas,” he said. “It is because there is now overpopulation and the installed pipes have outlived their time.

“We have already identified the spots that need pipe replacement and upgrading and have been executing that since last year using our own resources.”
Eng Moyo said the city had partnered Higherlife Foundation on the project.