There is a chronic shortage of water in Bulawayo, yet this is the second capital city of our country. The current government commissioned an ambitious but badly thought-out project called the Matabeleland-Zambezi Water Project in 1997.  With an estimated cost of US$600 million, it was a massive venture by any standards, but what the government failed to realise was that such an enormous project was not feasible without solid funding in place and the requisite management of such a project.

The government also ignored advice from hydro project experts who strongly argued against such a huge project, especially when the government did not have the mandatory funding in place. Most people viewed the doomed project as a very unwise way of ZANU PF trying to portray its care and concern for the people of Matabeleland because the government did not have the capacity or the resources to push through such a massive project.

Some view the ZANU PF government’s chronic ineptitude and failure to address the long overdue water problem in Matabeleland as a deliberate way of ensuring that Matabeleland lags behind in development.  However, while there may be some credible examples of deliberate neglect in parts of Matabeleland, the water pipeline project simply failed to get off the ground as a direct consequence of incompetence on the part of the ZANU PF government.

Of course the fact that the ZANU PF government could afford the expensive and bankrupting war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ahead of such important national projects, did not help matters.  This was a classic case of the ZANU PF government’s failure to prioritise national issues.  Such failure to prioritise national issues has resulted in the state of affairs prevailing in Matabeleland.

The ZPDP has a programme to resuscitate the stalled Matabeleland-Zambezi Water Project. Our party will secure the necessary resources that will see the project to its completion so as to alleviate the difficulty that people from that region are needlessly putting up with.

Our party will commission a comprehensive water package for Matabeleland that will also see the rehabilitation and expansion of other water bodies such as the Nyamandhlovu Aquifer, Mtshabezi Dam, Glass Block Dam and the Gwayi-Shangani Dam.

If well coordinated and directed all these water bodies and pipelines can feed into the central Bulawayo water reservoirs, thereby significantly averting the artificial water crisis crippling that region of our country.

The project will be committed into the hands of people with the professional competence and skills to manage a project of such magnitude.  The original consultancy and management structure of the entire project was chronically inadequate from the very beginning.  The ZPDP strongly believes that there was no adequate corporate involvement and familiarisation of the project with enough sponsors. Our party will seek to address these and other aspects of the project so as to put it back on track and move it towards proper completion.