BCC turns to boreholes, as water crisis deepens

BULAWAYO City Council (BCC) has moved in to fix all malfunctioning boreholes belonging to residents and other stakeholders as it seeks to lessen the city’s water woes.

This emerged during a meeting organised by the Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BPRA) early this week.

Representing the council, ward 3 councillor, Mxolisi Mahlangu said the local authority wants to make sure that all boreholes that are not working are fixed.

“These boreholes are in communities where there are councillors and they have started coming forward with the list of boreholes that need fixing. The department of engineering is seized with it,” Mahlangu said.

“They are boreholes already that they have started fixing and so it’s a process that they are doing.

“But also bear in mind that there is the issue of spares and those require foreign currency, so sometimes it might take time for them to be repaired at the speed that the residents want because they will be a challenge of spares constraints.”

Mahlangu did not have available statistics on how many boreholes are targeted for fixing.

BPRA director, Permanent Ngoma welcomed the council’s intervention.

Bulawayo residents are going for several days without water owing to depressed water levels at the city’s supply dams. The city’s raw water reservoirs are said to be at 41% full, with council warning early this week that two more dams, Lower Ncema and Upper Ncema, will also be decommissioned in the next few months due to fast depleting water stocks.

The council has already decommissioned Umzingwane over low water supplies.

In February, government said it had repaired 35 of 50 malfunctioning boreholes at the Nyamandlovu Aquifer as a stop-gap measure, but this has hardly made a dent on the country’s second largest city’s water woes.