The Sunday News
Mandy Ncube, Sunday News Reporter
HLANGABEZA High School in Nkayi, is appealing for assistance to purchase Jojo tanks in order to alleviate water shortages that have been dogging the Matabeleland North province learning institution.
School head, Mr Never Moyo said students were at risk of contaminating diseases due to water shortages.
“We stopped using water supplied by Zinwa in June 2016 because children’s fees could not suffice to pay Zinwa bills.
We decided to use our two boreholes. The boreholes are about 50 metres deep each. The water seemed sufficient at the time but now the water table has dropped drastically due to excessive abstraction in order to serve about 600 people in the school.
The water challenges worsened this year. We are using two by 5 000 litres Jojo tanks but now the water has been failing to reach our second storage tank positioned on a hill. This has hit some of the cottages as well as boys’ hostels hard,” he said.
Mr Moyo said the tanks are filled with water from the boreholes that are being pumped by electricity and when there is no electricity there would be no means of getting water, a situation that has raised the need for additional Jojo tanks at the school.
“The children have a hard time getting adequate water to drink, bath and wash their clothes. We have bought a few more storage tanks but they do not store adequate water for the whole school.
What we need is a very deep borehole strategically positioned to supply staff houses and hostels. We also need big storage tanks at least three x 10 000 litres for girls’ hostels, one x 10 000 litres for senior boys’ hostels and two x 10 000 litres for junior boys’ hostels but we have limited funds.
Our two boreholes use submersible pumps which are Zesa-powered. During the rainy season like right now we often face serious challenges due to power outages.
We rely on a single manual borehole for the water supply if the submersible pumps are down but there is congestion at the borehole since everyone would be in need of water. We cannot afford to have water shortages especially now in the Covid-19 era.”
