The Harare Residents’ Trust (HRT) considers the government’s thrust to impose prepaid water meters across the country to enhance revenue generation for local authorities as shortsighted, ill-advised and reactionary to long-known challenges affecting water service delivery and billing in local authorities.
According to government authorities, they have put together an unknown team to conduct a countrywide assessment of the project rollout, which will determine the number of prepaid water meters to install.
This team is reportedly looking at the current distribution network. The Ministry of Local Government and Public Works has signed agreements with the City of Harare, Hangzhou Liaison Technology Company, and Helcraw Electrical to implement the project on a Build, Operate and Transfer model.
Under this arrangement, water treatment, purification, distribution, and billing will be privatised, initially in Harare, before being rolled out across the country. The signing ceremonies were held at the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works offices, with very little information being provided to the people in the public interest.
The logic behind the introduction of the prepaid water meters, which government and council officials are busy calling smart water meters, is that the City of Harare has been struggling to raise revenues due to non-payment of rates by the residents.
They argue that the absence of a functional enterprise resource planning system, commonly referred to as the billing system, is part of the reasons behind the necessity for the introduction of prepaid water meters.
The HRT is disappointed that the Mayor of Harare has been at the forefront of endorsing this project without facilitating a single consultative meeting by the City of Harare to find out the thinking among residents and ratepayers.
His reasoning that this will enable the tracking of water consumption is lazy and inconsistent with the reality on the ground.
The Sunday Mail newspaper quoted Mayor Mafume saying that, “Water smart meters will enable residents to track their water consumption in real-time, allowing them to make informed decisions to reduce their usage.
“While we recognise the importance of access to clean water, we also need to ensure that we can recover the costs associated with treating and supplying water to our residents.”
These statements are infuriating to the residents of Harare, who have endured shambolic billing since 21 March 2019, when the BIQ enterprise resource planning system was discontinued following a dispute with the City of Harare.
Mayor Mafume speaks as if they have no control over the issue of the billing system, when they have been going in circles on this issue for a very long time.
The City of Harare is deliberately avoiding resolving the issue of the billing system because a few powerful individuals are benefitting from the chaos, which allows them to siphon council funds without transparency and accountability mechanisms derived from a functional billing system.
The City of Harare has previously acknowledged that conventional water meters in the oldest residential suburbs are stuck and dysfunctional at thousands of households.
They even launched, on two occasions, projects to replace the dysfunctional and stuck conventional water meters.
The irony of the interventions is that they were launched in the driest suburbs, which do not receive regular water supplies. Strangely, the council undertook those projects, which they abandoned midway without explanation.
Our suspicions are that the water meter replacement project was undertaken to siphon funds from the City of Harare coffers, but there was no intention to permanently address the issue of estimated water billing.
The City of Harare went on to conduct a pilot study on prepaid water meters in the Avenues, Bluffhill, Budiriro, Eastlea, Greendale, Kambuzuma, Sunningdale and Waterfalls.
The council installed 1,975 prepaid water meters during the pilot project in the indicated suburbs.
What is shocking is that the council never produced an evaluation report on the utility of the prepaid water meters installed by the five contractors. To date, the City of Harare has not produced a single report to show the findings of its pilot study on prepaid water meters.
The HRT conducted its study on the prepaid water meters, focusing on Budiriro, Kambuzuma, the Avenues and Sunningdale. It was established that none of the chosen contractors had the ideal technology to sustain the procurement of water meter tokens for water purchases.
The other key problem identified by the affected residents is that the network was always a challenge at the local district offices to the extent that City of Harare workers ended up facilitating the removal of the prepaid water meters and the restoration of the conventional water meters in all the suburbs.
The residents in suburbs that have erratic water supplies believe that prepaid water meters will resolve their problem of estimated billing.
Given the HRT findings on the feasibility and utility of prepaid water meters, the HRT urges the government to abandon their plans to burden residents with prepaid water meters when the real issue affecting local authorities is corruption and deliberate financial mismanagement which has crippled service delivery.
Recommendations 1. Plug leakages along the water distribution network to reduce non-revenue water.
- Undertake a conventional water meter replacement project in phases, starting with the oldest suburbs for accurate water meter readings.
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The City of Harare should produce an evaluation report of the pilot study on prepaid water meters that they undertook a few years ago.
Let the findings be made public to guide public discourse on the latest proposal for rolling out prepaid water meters.
- Relevant Parliamentary Portfolios, especially the one on Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, Water and Environment and Climate Change, should jointly conduct public hearings to allow the citizens of Zimbabwe to have their say on this important public policy intervention.
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Install a functional, transparent and accountable billing system in Harare to plug all financial leakages, which are being deliberately left open.
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Implement devolution as provided in Chapter 14 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, Amendment (Number 20) Act of 2013 to give more autonomy to local authorities to discharge their constitutional mandate with minimal national government interference.
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Ring-fence current water revenues to maintain, upgrade and expand the existing water treatment, storage and distribution infrastructure. 8. The signed agreement between the City of Harare, Helcraw Electrical and Hangzhou Liaison Technology Company should be subject to public scrutiny.
The contents remain unknown to the residents of Harare.
Conclusion Prepaid water meters will never help improve the quantity of water delivered to the residents, nor will they address the quality of the water supplied.
Given the deliberate failure by the local authorities, especially the City of Harare, to secure a functional, transparent and accountable enterprise resources planning system, it is prudent to initially invest in plugging the leakages and illegal water connections along the water distribution network to reduce non-revenue water.
The private companies being brought in by the national government to provide the prepaid water meters and be involved in the whole water value chain are interested in profit and not improving service delivery.
The City of Harare and the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works should protect the public interest more than facilitating bad deals for the Harare ratepayers.
This prepaid water meters deal lacks transparency and accountability, demonstrating that its proponents are not keen on enhancing citizen participation, access to information in the public interest and enhancing service provision but achieving their profitmaking motivations.
