The community of Beit Bridge spent the entire weekend without water after ZINWA, the local water supply authority, cut the supply over a R500 000 debt owed to the utility by the local municipality.

The town secretary, Dr Sipho Singo, told Mirror that there was an impasse between his council and residents, with the latter not having paid fixed water charges for the past three months, a development that subsequently led to the local authority’s failing to raise enough money to pay ZINWA for the commodity.

“The problem is that our collection rate is such that we only manage to raise between R50 000 and R60 000 per month, yet we are supposed to pay ZINWA at least R600 000 every month and this is largely because a majority of our residents are refusing to pay water charges to the municipality. As council we, in turn, could not manage to service the debt. I am glad we communicated with them (ZINWA) and they understood our situation and subsequently agreed to restore supply while the two parties work on the outstanding issues.

“We expressed our concern to ZINWA that, since Beit Bridge is a cholera-prone district, such a move would only worsen the situation and we could subsequently see a fresh cholera outbreak,” he said.

Residents of the border town have been refusing for the past three months to pay water, sewerage and refuse collection charges, arguing that the rates were too high, cou-pled with the local authority’s failure to provide water to some sections of Dulibadzimu. Residents are calling for the service charges to be affordable like those in neighbouring Musina.

Singo will, however, soon hold a meeting with local councillors to discuss the issue of reducing rates and tariffs. This follows a recent joint meeting between the local business community and residents, in which both parties drafted a document proposing the slashing of rates by the council. They want the rates to be similar to those charged by the neighbouring Musina Municipality.

“We are organizing a meeting with councillors over the issue of high tariffs and our hope is that, once that problem is addressed, people will be able to pay rates to council. I am glad our people have shown understanding and willingness to work with the council in the past. We saw this during the clean-up exercise, where both the business community and residents offered to complement us in that regard because they knew the challenges we were facing,” he said.

Some residents received shocking water bills of as much as R11 000 last week, despite that the fact some sections of Dulibazdimu suburb have not been receiving water for that past two years.

Singo said they managed to purchase three booster pump engines from South Africa to help augment the water supply in areas currently not receiving the commodity. Residents in the affected areas currently rely on water delivered daily to strategic points by South African trucks from the Department of Water Affairs. The South African government offered to assist Zimbabwe in supplying clean water to local residents at the height of the cholera outbreak in that country. “We hope that the problem of water in some areas of Dulibadzimu North will soon be a thing of the past as we are now in the process of installing new booster pumps,” he said.