On 9 October The Herald reported that Gweru City Council is battling sewer blockages it blames on residents flushing plastic bags, nappies, sanitary products and rags, with sewage spilling into homes and streets in Mkoba, Mtapa, Senga and Ascot.
The council has the contents of its pipes right. Mayor Martin Chivhoko told councillors that crews had responded to more than 300 blockages in a single quarter, and put the main cause down to solid items flushed or thrown into drains. That works out at more than three a day, every day, for three months.
Nobody should defend flushing a nappy.
Even the people who speak for residents concede the point. When Chivhoko earlier complained of dead dogs, sanitary products and kitchen utensils being pulled from sewer lines, the director of the Gweru Residents and Ratepayers Association agreed that no normal person should dump such things there. So the residents are not innocent, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
What interests me is how long the explanation has lasted. In his 2021 State of the City address, then-mayor Josiah Makombe also urged residents to stop throwing solid waste into drains and sewers, but he went further and told the city that low-lying homes near the trunk lines were suffering serious backflows because the waste water stations were overwhelmed and could not cope with the flows. That second half has all but vanished from the official line.
A council that admitted five years ago that its own plants were overwhelmed now speaks as though the only variable is what households put down the toilet. Mayors have changed, the sermon has not, and the blockages have kept coming.
If appeals to civic virtue were going to work, they would have worked by now.
The refuse system deserves a closer look, because it sits upstream of the sewer. A Herald report from 2023 described heaps of soiled nappies and sanitary wear in Mambo, Ascot, Mtapa, Senga and Mkoba, the same suburbs now in the news, and tied them to the council’s failure to collect refuse, which had pushed residents to create dumpsites near their homes.
The council itself said in March that it had cleared dump sites and returned to its normal collection schedule, while admitting it sometimes struggles to keep to it. A household whose street the refuse truck rarely visits has a stark choice about where a nappy goes, and the toilet is the one service that reliably takes things away.
There is a plumbing angle as well. Parts of Mkoba were reported to have gone more than three months with dry taps. Sewers that carry too little water struggle to move solids along, though I would want the council’s engineers to confirm how much that contributes in Gweru.
Then there are the failures that no household can cause. In Old Ascot this year, residents stopped using tap water they said smelled of sewage, and the ward councillor confirmed the problem was real after it had persisted for three weeks. Another report described raw effluent flowing for three months from a burst main serving Ascot, Claremont Park and Tinshill, with a residents’ leader saying repeated reports to the engineering department had produced no solution.
A burst main is not a nappy problem. And the council is hardly a stranger to sewage as a source of harm. In 2018 villagers in Lower Gweru said the council’s raw sewage had polluted the river, which the Environmental Management Agency had condemned.
None of this means the council is lying. Chivhoko says it is increasing sewer jetting and inspection, and that is the right direction.
How many of those 300 blockages were solids, and how many were roots, sand, collapsed pipe or a main that has run past its design life? Which suburbs account for the most? How many kilometres of sewer has the council replaced in a year, and how much of its revenue goes to the sewer network?
Those figures would turn a lecture into an argument that residents could weigh for themselves.
Until then the council is asking a population with erratic water, patchy refuse collection and recurring spills to carry the main burden of a system it controls.
Residents can stop flushing nappies tomorrow. Whether the pipes, pumps and trucks can carry everything else is a question only the council can answer.
Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo || Social Justice Activist
Email: kumbiraithierryn@gmail.com
Portfolio: https://muckrack.com/kumbirai-thierry-nhamo/
Source: Gweru Has a Sewer Problem. Naturally, the Residents Are on Trial. – Zealous Thierry
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