The Sunday News
Vincent Gono, Features Editor
MS Nobuhle Mlilo* pushes her leg straight and looks aside as she struggles with her eyes to swallow back the stubborn small tears wetting her eyelashes.
Her neighbour uses a large needle to pierce through the skin of her foot as she tries to bare and ultimately remove a thorn that she had stepped on when they were looking for firewood in the bush. They are planning to go and look for water at a well that was dug to water vegetable nurseries in a sewer stream between Magwegwe West and Pumula North suburbs in Bulawayo which they will use to flush the toilets.
Other residents use the water for their gardens and that requires several trips to the well that has become popular and is characterised by snaking queues, where women and girls gather and chatter as they wait for their turn to get water.
Such has been the daily routine of most urban women who are not formally employed as well as girls of all ages who have not been going to school due to the Covid-19-induced schools shutdown. To them, as to the generality of the common people, the problems point to nothing but a gross failure by political authorities to find permanent solutions to the myriad of challenges that they never used to experience in any urban set ups.
Life in town has become more difficult than in rural areas especially to women who are, by virtue of traditional social set-up, expected to look for firewood that has become not only scarce but an illegality according to city council by-laws. And the problems are not unique to Bulawayo but have become the new normal in many towns and cities.
Water challenges are blamed on local authorities that run them, while electricity scarcity is hardly understood. To many it is caused by mendacity at Zesa and breakdown of generators at Hwange and Kariba and authorities have shouldered the accusations of buying old equipment.
That the water levels at Kariba are dwindling is, to many, a political myth that can hardly be believed although slow and perfunctory steps have been taken by the stakeholders to conscientise the communities on the effects of climate change, the story has remained maverick.
The subject of climate change has remained elusive and scientific but its effects are there for all to see. Stretching far and wide from food shortages, decreased rainfall patterns, high temperatures to heat waves, human and animal diseases and cyclones just to mention the common ones.
All that conspire into a huge ball of socio-economic and political problems for communities around the world as the phenomena is not a localised one but a global catastrophe. In Zimbabwe the effects are manifesting themselves in drought which is contributing to child marriages, child prostitution, and cattle deaths while politically food riots are a likelihood.
Economically it means more money is needed for food imports, lack of electricity which affects economic production, medical drug imports and little investment if any. This was bared at a recent workshop in Bulawayo where the Ministry of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry is carrying out resilient building awareness training with the hope of cascading the information to the communities.
A participant from Matabeleland Women Farmers, Mrs Morage Tshuma said women were badly affected by the effects of climate change that manifest themselves in the home and they should not be left out of the awareness campaigns.
“The awareness should be inclusive. Everyone should be taken on board especially women who are made to look for water and firewood in urban areas. It is a fact that women and the girl child are now walking painful distances to look for water but they don’t know what is causing that. So, I would want to suggest that awareness campaigns should target such societal groups so that when we talk of adaptation and mitigation, they will be aware of what we will be talking about. Girls are being mugged and abused sexually while looking for water and firewood and they spend the better part of the day in queues,” she said.
The ministry’s permanent secretary, Mr Munesu Munodawafa said the impact of climate change could no longer be overemphasised with aspects of extreme weather event such as flooding and droughts on the increase in recent years.
Government, he said, was engaging parliamentarians, chiefs and headmen to get the information to the grassroots noting that the national response to the global effects of climate change goes beyond finance.
“People have lived with the effects of climate change and I believe it’s now a lot easier to get the message across. We are showing them things that they have seen and telling them things that they have experienced and so the message has impact.
“As a country we have made several strides in building our capacity, one of which is engaging in massive awareness. We are putting together a policy paper that speaks to the effects of climate change in or climate change mainstreaming. We are also investing in climate change mitigation projects and environment friendly agriculture techniques,” he said.
Mr Munodawafa said the country was part to the Paris Agreement and has access to resources from the Green Fund where it received US$26 million in March for climate change mitigation programmes. The Government came in with US$40 as an addition to the Green Fund making it US$66 million. He however, said there was need for additional resources to continue building mitigation and adaptation capacity to cushion the communities against climate change shocks.
He said rainfall seasons were increasingly becoming uncertain threatening livelihoods and economic performance adding that Government was responding to this urgent need for climate action by facilitating for an enabling environment for climate change programming in the country.
“The impact of climate change may not be overemphasised with aspects of extreme weather event such as flooding and droughts on the increase in recent years. The situation is worsened by the relationship between poor rainfall and GDP performance.
“The Government has responded to this urgent need for climate action by facilitating for an enabling environment for climate change programming in the country. As the country develops its medium-term development strategy, it is taking concerted efforts to integrate climate change issues in the plans to ensure our development efforts are climate proofed against unprecedented climate change vagaries,” said Mr Munodawafa.
He added that there was a general consensus on the vulnerability of agriculture, human settlement, infrastructure, water, health, forest and biodiversity sectors to the impacts of climate change.
Such effects, he said, needed people to collectively agree on the country’s adaptation goal while also ensuring that it was aligned with the country vision of developing in a low carbon and climate resilient trajectory.
“It is therefore, imperative to consult widely ensuring that marginalised and vulnerable groups are engaged during the process of coming up with the resilience building interventions as provided for by this forum,” he said.
Presentations were made by different stakeholders with Prof Desmond Manatsa hinting that climate extremes were increasing shifts in agro-ecological zones in the country with a possibility of having agro-ecological Region 5B where rainfall could no longer sustain agriculture.
