The Sunday Mail
Emmanuel Kafe —
Mukuvisi River, which coils from Cleveland Dam in Harare into the soap and fertiliser manufacturing industrial sites of Msasa and Graniteside, collecting vast amounts of toxins that are dumped into it by industrialists defying environmental laws, remains a hazard to people in surrounding areas.
Raw sewage from suburbs like Mbare flows freely into the river. The river is filled with raw excreta, used condoms, empty bottles of BronCleer syrup, and all manner of discarded garments.
Small, filthy fiefdoms have been erected along the river, with street urchins turning the banks into their homes. The bulk of the settlements in this area lack the requisite water and sanitation facilities and more importantly, they do not have functioning drainage systems, neither are they built in a systematic way: they are scattered, making attempts to regularise them really difficult.
Without proper road infrastructure, water sources and sewer systems, the residents of the illegal settlements often end up digging wells and constructing pit latrines as they please, putting themselves at risk of contracting diseases.
But that is not all. The people living along the Mukuvisi River are prone to flooding whenever there are heavy rains.
With incessant rainfalls being experienced almost daily this summer season, Harare’s drainage system is feeding into the Mukuvisi, flooding the homes in the settlements.
The Mukuvisi is the proverbial time bomb waiting to blow. Whenever the sky turns grey the illegal settlers along the river banks get into a panic mode, fearing for the sparse possessions in their homes as well as for the very shacks themselves.
The Sunday Mail Extra recently visited the river at the point where it cuts across Mbare. Looking at the sky, his face disturbed by the dark clouds above, Mervis Mushongani utters something like “zuva zvaranga rabuda wani, yavakudzoka futi” (the sun had come out, why are the rains coming again?).
Her fear is real. When one lives in a flimsy shelter, the rains are not the blessing that farmers see them as.
Every time it rains, she fears that the shack that is her home will fall apart. The structure sits on undesignated land on the edges of the Mukuvisi near blocks of flats in Mbare.
Without fail, when it rains her home is flooded. It is a nightmare, Mushongani says, as her husband tries to stop the water from getting in.
Their mattress of cardboard boxes and plastics lies in one corner while a loaded laundry line spans the other end of the tiny dwelling.
The few other possessions — a single-door kitchen cabinet and a chest of drawers are laid on a bed of bricks, but the water menacingly creeps upwards.
The other “room”, where their nine-year-old child who should be in school sleeps, is so cramped one wonders how anyone contorts to fit into such a nook.
Just a stone’s throw from their shack, Maluleke shares a tiny two-roomed shack with his wife Joyce and four children aged 19, 15, 8 and seven.
“We fear living here because we know that when the river gets full, our shacks will be flooded,” he says. “My children are forced to sleep on the kitchen floor because there is not enough room for all of us.”
Maluleke knows the banks of the Mukuvisi are far from ideal for living quarters.
“We are not supposed to live here but there is no other option. Circumstances forced us to come here,” he says. “We do not live a happy life. But what can we do? We have nowhere else to go. No one from the municipality or high office of the Government has ever come to us to say that we have to move here,” Maluleke said.
He says children know the risks of living here.
“They are aware of the dangers we live with; they do not play near the river banks or even attempt jumping into the river. They keep as far away from the river as possible,” he said.
Maluleke remembers three drownings in the area, that of an old man and two young boys. Harare city council spokesperson Mr Michael Chideme said people who live on banks of the Mukuvisi should find somewhere else to move to.
“Those people are vagrants and should move to their homes not the river banks, they are illegally settling there and the area is prone to flash floods,” he said.
