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YESTERDAY Bulawayo residents woke up to an announcement by the Bulawayo City Council (BCC) of a three-day weekly water shedding exercise which the local authority attributed to power outages.

Last Friday BCC introduced a weekly 48-hour water shedding programme to affect the city except for the city centre and industrial sites.

With yesterday’s announcement, it means the local authority has added another 24 hours to the water shedding programme and for residents this recalls an ugly experience of a water crisis that rocked the city in the past two years.

The crisis resulted in water-borne diseases across suburbs with Luveve recording at least 13 deaths.

Only that this time around, the water shedding comes on the back of a good rainy season with BCC claiming that the cuts are due to subdued power at their pumping stations.

“The public is being advised of the introduction of a 72-hour shedding programme citywide.

This is due to further delays in the recovery of the system since it was affected by power outages that occurred two weeks ago.

The power outage resulted in the loss of and subsequently subdued abstraction and pumping,” said Bulawayo Town Clerk Mr Christopher Dube in a statement on Wednesday.

“Further correspondence from Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) shows that they will be working on the Hwange Power Grid for another week beginning November 16, 2021 from 7AM to 7PM every day which will continue to disrupt Nyamandlovu pumping which will be reduced from the regular 15ML/day to 3ML/day.”

Mr Dube said water delivery systems were further compromised after a transformer was burnt at Umzingwane Dam disrupting raw water delivery.

“ZETDC has so far installed a temporary transformer that can only handle 50 percent pumping capacity. It is against this background of limited water delivery that the city is introducing the 72-hour water shedding to avoid system collapse,” he said.

However, ZETDC southern region manager Engineer Lovemore Chinaka said the power company is not experiencing any faults that warrants increased water shedding.

“What I can tell you is that we just had those challenges for one or two days. We have not experienced anything that is of concern. What we are dealing with are normal faults that occur on the lines,” said Eng Chinaka.

The response by Eng Chinaka to the claims by BCC are interesting as they are revealing in the sense that it seems the local authority is trying to find convenient cover behind the power utility to justify its failure to pump water to the people.

So, what is really happening at BCC? What are the reasons behind their failure to pump water to the people? And why have they elected to hide behind ZETDC instead of coming out in the open with the real reasons behind their incapacity?

Now that their attempt to mislead the Bulawayo public has been exposed, it is hoped that BCC will own up and tell the real truth behind their failure to pump water to residents.

They can always approach the Government for assistance with whatever challenge they are facing as the Second Republic led by President Mnangagwa has countless times shown readiness to intervene and help local authorities to deliver service to the people.

In the midst of the Bulawayo water crisis in May last year, President Mnangagwa directed that the city’s water problems must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

After the President’s direction Professor Mthuli Ncube, the Minister of Finance led a high-powered delegation to Bulawayo for discussions on funding to address the water challenges.

Following the high-level meeting, Government released funds for drilling and equipping boreholes at Epping Forest in Nyamandlovu that saw the city getting an additional 10 megalitres (ML) per day to the depressed city’s water supplies bringing relief to residents.

The Second Republic, through the Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme, has embarked on a nationwide exercise of repairing roads, some of them run by councils, as it sets the tone for development across the country.

It is against this background that BCC must be honest about the causes behind their failure to pump water to the people, so that, if need be, Government intervenes as it has done before.

It is unhelpful to mislead the public. The people have the Second Republic which cares about them so if BCC cannot deliver, step aside and let Government show you how it is done.