By Simbarashe Namusi
Mai Rudo's borehole stands behind her kitchen in a Harare suburb. She drilled it because the tap in her yard runs dry in two ways. Sometimes there is no water. Sometimes there is no credit on the prepaid meter. The meter is attached to the tap, inside a locked box. She can read it, and she can top it up. She cannot question it.
The City supplies water three days a week and guarantees none of them. The other four days, the tap gives nothing. Three days do not make up for four. The last bill covered the period before the meter was fitted, and it included the rates as well. She paid part of it. She did not argue.
A timetable is pinned to her gate with a nail. Four streets, four slots. Households collect water during their allotted hour and leave. She does not charge for the water. She keeps the order.
By six every morning, the first women are there, their containers lined up. A man fills drums for a neighbour who is too old to carry them. Nobody pushes. Everyone knows the hour.
Her supply is more reliable than the City's. That is not a boast. The street can confirm it. If her pump fails, her neighbours knock on her door by nine.
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The City's meter gives a reading, and the reading is final. It counts what arrives. It cannot count the four days when nothing does, and it shuts off the tap to a household that cannot pay. Her timetable hangs where forty households can read it, and any of them can say it is wrong. A utility with an unquestionable meter answers to no one standing in front of it.
The same lack of scrutiny that leaves the meter unquestioned leaves the ground unwatched. There is a slower cost, and nobody at the gate pays it. Her borehole draws from the same ground as the one behind the next house. Together, they represent a city pumping from an account no one audits.
The water table falls over the years. Each household notices only that the pump must go deeper or that drilling costs more. The shallow boreholes fail first. They belong to the households that could least afford to drill deeper. Mai Rudo will learn this from her own pump.
A failed service does not disappear. It is replaced by private arrangements, and the cost shifts to the household. The household pays the arrears and the rates, and carries a meter it cannot dispute. Then it queues at a gate, where the water is free.
The City's failure becomes a neighbour's labour, and later, a neighbour's shortage.
Mai Rudo's timetable is pinned to the gate with a nail. It has not moved since March.
Simbarashe Namusi is a media expert writing in his personal capacity.
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