The Sunday News
At the height of the water shedding regime, I did not find time to critically engage on the issue of the water crisis. However, now is the time to visit that neglected and yet pertinent human livelihood matter confronting our city and the country at large.
Following the past year’s drought, water remains a critical subject of attention. In fact the issue of water availability and distribution is of national importance. On the other hand, the effects of global climate change violently invites the third-world to openly discuss issues of water supply and sustainable conservation methods.
However, I will not fully discuss the matter from a broader third-world perspective. Above it all, water is life. Thus any discussion about water calls the urgency of life and death. For us in the third-world borrowing frameworks of water supply from the colonial structures the discussion about water demands the same decolonial attention we give to affirmative repossession of the means of production.
This is because without water we cannot talk of liberating the industry, we cannot even talk about innovative scientific developments. All aspirations of national progress need watering by water itself. Without water, the much celebrated Command Agriculture Government initiative will be a failure. Therefore, with interest of making this weekly discussion space relevant to national dialogue I have found it important to talk about our country’s water situation and its dilemmas zeroing to the recent Bulawayo water crisis.
The 2016 water crisis episode was not new to this city. For many years the city has been subjected to such conditions of shortage of the precious liquid. This calls for an intellectual engagement on the matter; as such Professor Muchaparara Musemwa’s research is a critical point of reference to the water debate in Zimbabwe. Apart from his several publications on water politics in Zimbabwe, In 2014 Prof Musemwa produced a ground-breaking publication titled, Water, History, and Politics in Zimbabwe: Bulawayo’s Struggles with the Environment, 1894-2008. This book will be under review these coming weeks. It is my hope that the ensuing discussions on the book will offer a meaningful continuum of the dialogue of water’s place in Zimbabwe’s history and politics as espoused by Prof Musemwa.
Too late and not too little a subject
As diligent readers of this column would recall; an incalculable batch of my submissions in 2016 were on the question of identity and Africa’s epistemic bankruptcy. The topics became too queued to give attention to some emerging critical matters and how they are packaged in our contemporary granaries of public knowledge and scholarly discourses.
Due to deep considerations of the need for a newspaper column to address matters within their fresh state of being contemporary; Bulawayo’s water crisis seems not to be getting stale in public dialogue. Water rationing has become an annual routine, usually complemented by public and civil society outcries usually fixated on polarised and unsubstantiated regional marginalisation innuendoes.
Therefore, the Bulawayo water crisis has been speculated and disseminated in compelling degrees of attention and particularly calling for a decolonial intervention to the subject of the City of Kings’ water crisis.
Having concluded the five-week series of reminiscing, recalling and recollecting Frantz Fanon’s legacy it is imperative to jump straight to the issue of Bulawayo’s water dilemma.
After celebrating 120 years of being a city I am certain, the daylight revulsions, dismays and horrors of the city’s water shedding regime experienced in the last stretch of 2016 will not be ejected from the collective memory of the city’s immiseration; as has been the case since the day Rhodes pronounced its modernity. To this day, households in Matshobana, Mzilikazi, Nketha, Mganwini, Mpophoma, Tshabalala, Luveve, Njube, Phelandaba will not effortlessly disremember how the water shedding regime compromised their daily livelihood.
However, it is dismaying that the Bulawayo City Council (BCC) has revealed that the move to effect the water shedding regime was not strategically premeditated. It was not well-thought, it was instinct-induced. This follows a report by Chronicle on Friday, the 6th of December, 2016 and was headlined, “Water shedding fails, BCC scraps schedule”. According to Chronicle’s revelation, the city’s engineering department noted that water shedding was ineffective because the city’s piping system is retarded and the rationing even added to the burden of recurrent pipe bursts. The use of bowsers to supply water to the dry areas of the city never eased the burden as logistical challenges were also incurred.
Therefore, it is against this background that I have summoned myself to critically tackle this matter. As a result, I found it prudent not only to use of traditional speculation and emotions regarding this matter. However, that does not erase the sadness that comes with the fact that weeks the Bulawayo was subjected to a “Much Ado about nothing” water shedding. The recently experienced water shedding never helped in alleviating the city’s main sources of water supplies’ critical levels, especially Upper Ncema dam. As a result of the critical water levels of Upper Ncema the city was subjected to high dependance on Lower Ncema following the decommissioning of the Mzingwane dam. This endangered point of the Bulawayo’s water supply crisis was outlined in a Sunday News report published on the 31st of October, 2016 — warning the city about the water shedding which was to be effected by the Bulawayo City Council (BCC) in November, 2016.
Of Water, History and Politics in Zimbabwe
The book under review surveys the historical and political underppinnings City of Bulawayo’s struggles with the environment from 1894 to 2008 given its locality in the everlastingly semi-arid region of south-western Zimbabwe. Musemwa’s research is solely narrowed on a case-study of Makhokhoba which is still colonially misspelt as Makokoba, Bulawayo’s first and oldest township. Not only is Makhokhoba the oldest township of Bulawayo, but it is a birthmark of the Rhodesianisation/urbanisation of this city.
Today, Makhokhoba stands as a symbol of the coloniality of Zimbabwe’s urbanisation project just as is the case with Harare’s Mbare township, Gweru’s Mkoba township and Mutare’s Sakubva to mention, but a few of the oldest townships. Makhokhoba was specifically erected to accommodate the immigrant labour force of this city’s then industrial nerve centrality to colonial Zimbabwe. This essentially means that the housing and social infrastructure of the old township was not only meant for urban peasants, but a sub-standard class of citizens whose sole function was to serve as human machinery to colonial capital and sustaining Rhodesianism.
From this point of appreciating Makhokhoba as a colonial labour outlet of the then modernised slavery conditions; Musemwa (2014) explores the history of the township’s institutionally dehumanised residents and their struggles over access to water during the colonial period. Musemwa (2014)’s thesis is centred on a sustainable livelihoods perspective.
However, he further dissects this view to attend to the political-economy of the water history of Bulawayo within the lens of Makhokhoba township.
The sustainable livelihoods perspective posits that human-security and environmental security are inseparably interweaved.
The book argues that water scarcity in Bulawayo, especially as it greatly affected Africans was a result of both biophysical conditions and anthropogenic factors. The biophysical attention given to Musemwa’s assertion is that Bulawayo is a geographically perennially semi-arid space. This he substantiates by taking note of the mild and hard famines of the 19th century which have been experienced by the city since 1861-62, 1864 and 1895-96. Musemwa’s research also indicates that the 20th century has not spared Bulawayo high water deprives and makes strong reference to the droughts of 1912-13, 1946-47, 1965, 1982-84, 1986-87 and 1991-92.
The study is also conversant with Bulawayo’s 21st century famines and their effects to the city’s water crisis mainly the drought between 2004 and 2008.
Musemwa further adopts the anthropogenic approach to his argument as he states that part of the water scarcity and distribution challenge is a result of man-made policies. These man-made struggles to water access are entrenched struggles over access to, and management of, water resources in both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. According to Masemwa, the anthropogenic side of the crisis is evident of deliberate marginalities of water supplies dating back to the colonial days.
Thus Musemwa, argues that Makhokhoba has not been a priority in terms of water supply since the township was for lesser humans as premised in prejudices of coloniality which he claims are manifest to this day as packages of post-independence marginalisation:
Simply put, insufficient availability of water is not always about the lack of water. It is about how resource distribution and how those who wield political and economic power allocate the preponderance of resources themselves and to the socially marginalised. In support of such distribution patterns, fields of power such as race, class, gender , ethnicity and regionalism become powerful organising principles and rhetorical apparatus to legitimate the denial of access of water to the urban poor (Muchemwa 2014: xviii).
From this position Musemwa argues that water is a tool of political and social control. As a result, his book submits that the anthropogenic side of the Bulawayo water crisis has a strong colonial grounding whose enabling factor was racism. Therefore, in post-colonial Zimbabwe the same model of socio-political control is applied from a regional political point of view.
In Musemwa’s point of view, this marginalisation has been reproduced from racism to tribalism. Like most “unpatriotic” historians (Borrowing from the “patriotic history” (2004) by Terence Ranger), Muchemwa (2014) follows the conventional anti-establishment narrative of presenting Bulawayo as a space of state ordered marginalisation.
While Musemwa’s debate is critical in understanding the history of water distribution — challenges and recommendations to better these challenges; the reader is made to conclude that water as a human right has been used to punish Bulawayo for its strong anti-establishment order from the colonial to the post-colonial period. Moreover, Musemwa specifically attributes the water crisis of the early 80s and 90s to Zanu-PF’s revenge to the city for being a stronghold of PF-Zapu during and after the liberation struggle. Musemwa’s book goes further to link the millennium water shortages in Bulawayo to the city’s political subscription to MDC.
For the purpose of creating a counter debate to the submission by Musemwa, this series will use a comparative analytical approach of the Bulawayo water problem with that of other cities which are predominantly Shona.
The idea is to go beyond Musemwa’s attribution of the water crisis to the problem of ethnicity.
I will also use other parts of the country which are Zanu-PF electoral strongholds to challenge the view that the Bulawayo water crisis is a result of political marginalisation. In simple terms, this series will attempt to dislodge Musemwa’s assertion about the water crisis in Bulawayo as a plan “. . . to discipline the dissident city”.
I will further investigate how the Bulawayo water problem presents us with a far-reaching crisis of hydro-innovation rather than marginal hydro-politics as presented in Musemwa’s book.
I will go further to substantiate how we are a city in poverty of craft-competency and craft (Jonathan Moyo 1993).
