The Harare city council will borrow Z$50-billion (about R62-million) to restore water to parts of the city that gets just six hours supply a day.
A Sapa correspondent reported on Monday that the move follows the resignation of all opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) councillors this month.
The MDC-dominated city council complained that the central government had made it impossible to govern because of interference and were withholding funds.
Water supplies to the Zimbabwean capital have seen a steady decline over the last year, though the city’s main dams and reservoirs are all full.
Harare’s director of works, Psychology Chiwanga, said faulty water treatment plants and broken pumping equipment were to blame for the crisis, the first in the city’s 100-year-long history.
Still, many residents in the city of about four-million people said they were not receiving any water at all.
”I have had no water for over two weeks,” said Philip Chikwenya, an executive living in Harare’s wealthy Borrowdale suburb.
”My whole family is forced to bath at different friends’ houses.”
In the poor eastern township of Mabvuku, Gladys Takawira, who supports five children, said: ”We rarely have water, even for cooking it is a problem. Often we must get dirty water from rivers, but we are afraid of cholera.”
Council workers complained that they were keeping ageing equipment working in an effort to keep supplies trickling through to the thirsty city. Some of the equipment is over 50 years old and obsolete, they said. – Sapa