TENDER documents issued last year to repair corroded sections of a crucial pipeline now dumping millions of litres of raw sewage into Lake Chivero have mysteriously vanished, triggering a devastating ecological and public health disaster.
The Zimbabwe Independent can exclusively reveal the shocking extent of the scandal, which has rocked the corruption-riddled Harare City Council (HCC).
The tender, if executed, could have averted the sewerage crisis that has now poisoned the lake, killed wildlife and put Harare’s 1,3 million residents at grave risk.
Instead, the city is grappling with an unfolding catastrophe caused by years of mismanagement and bureaucratic inertia.
It was not clear when or why the documents disappeared.
But an HCC executive confirmed the tender documents had vanished under mysterious circumstances, adding that if the process had been successfully completed, Zimbabwe’s capital would have averted the crisis.
At the weekend, the shores of Lake Chivero were littered with the lifeless bodies of fish — a vital protein source for many residents — while wildlife succumbed to water
contaminated with toxic cyanobacteria.
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Among the casualties were four rhinos, three zebras, four wildebeest and four fish eagles, along with an unspecified number of goats and cattle.
Laboratory tests commissioned by the Independent on Wednesday confirmed what residents feared most: HCC is pumping dangerously toxic water into their homes.
Even boiling the water fails to make it safe, as it contains harmful levels of nitrates, manganese and other contaminants from raw sewage.
“The water exceeds the recommended drinking limit (as set out by the World Health Organisation),” an official at the laboratory said. “Nitrates and manganese come from sewers. Therefore, we suspect improperly functioning septic systems or sewage infrastructure.
“Turbidity provides a good environment for microbial growth, hence the high total coliform value. The water cannot be used for cooking though it can be used to wash vegetables.”
A high coliform count in water can indicate the presence of disease-causing organisms, or pathogens, in the water. These pathogens can cause a number of health issues, including: diarrhea, vomiting, fever, upset stomach, dysentery, salmonellosis, hepatisis and giardiasis. Children and the elderly are at a higher risk of the harmful health effects of these organisms.
The pipeline, which runs from Chisipite through the central business district to Glen Norah, is discharging 80 million litres of raw sewage daily into the Firle treatment plant, located just 5km from the confluence of the Mukuvisi and Manyame Rivers.
HCC’s tender (Number CoH/HW/S/03/2023) was supposed to address the “rehabilitation, replacement, and upgrading of corroded steel pipelines”.
The bid submission deadline was May 9, 2023.
It was valued at US$16 million, payable at the official exchange rate.
Efforts to access the documents, as permitted by the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act (Section 69, subsection three), were unsuccessful, as the documents are no longer in the Harare City Council's possession.
HCC officials said the procurement documents were kept by the municipality’s supply chain manager, Never Murerwa, who did not respond to enquiries by the Independent.
Acting Town Clerk Mabhena Moyo told the Independent that the local authority was trying to regularise the contentious tender process by seeking counsel from the Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Praz).
“We have referred the tender process to Praz. We are trying to regularise the process,” Moyo said.
Harare mayor Jacob Mafume said: “I have referred all the questions to the technical team so that they can explain in detail; then I will have the responses tomorrow.”
HCC acting director of water Richard Kunyadini stated that he was not there during the tender process.
“I was not there last year when the tender was flighted,” Kunyadini said. “I am fairly new and I do not have the details. But what we want as a department and what we have been pushing for is to have the tender replaced. But it seems there is slowness on the part of the procurement department. I do not know what is actually wrong and what caused the previous tender not to go through. But what we want as a department is to have a tender. This has to be done in a legal way.”
A series of documents showed that Attoch Industrial Solutions, Consolidated Water Industries, Active Insight, Watermark Technologies and Case Construction submitted bids for the tender.
Consolidated Water Industries and Watermark, as the documents further reveal, were the “only companies who attended the site visit meeting on May 4 this year”.
Sources privy to the issue told the Independent that the matter had been “a subject of serious discussions at Town House, which failed to yield positive results”.
“A series of meetings have been held at Town House to understand how the documents vanished. However, all these meetings have failed to deliver any meaningful outcome.
“Harare City Council continues to dump millions of litres of raw sewage into the water body daily, putting the life of people, wildlife, aquatic life and livestock in danger.
“This has been going on for some time. Concerned stakeholders must swiftly intervene to address this matter,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
Another source said the catastrophe had also “become a subject of interest by the Joint Operations Command (Joc) due to the security threat it poses in terms of triggering water borne diseases”.
Joc is the supreme organ for the coordination of state security.
“Let us look at the downstream effects focusing on water treatment. Harare City Council has been discharging huge volumes of contaminated water into the lake threatening every facet of those who depend on it for survival. This also includes the aquatic cycle,” the source said.
“On the treatment of water, the more the turbidity, the more the city requires for water treatment processes. Killing the lake is killing life. The defunct Amalinda pipeline is part of the critical path in terms of addressing continuous discharge of raw sewage into streams leading to Chivero. The volumes of discharged raw sewage are huge.”
In February, health authorities detected four bacteria causing water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery in some of Harare’s water sources.
The bacteria in question include escherichia coli (e-coli), that is passed through faecal waste, gardia lamblia (dysentery), the salmonella typhi (typhoid), and vibrio cholera (cholera).
As early as 2020, the Independent revealed that a study commissioned by the local authority exposed that HCC was pumping water laced with dangerous toxins that can cause liver and central nervous system diseases to residents.
