Mutare residents are complaining after the City Council has since revealed that they are in a move to introduce pre-paid water meters on their houses.
This after the engineering department, and the council is losing millions in revenue as a result of some 53 percent of its water that is unaccounted for because of leaks...which they have recently resolved and they have only unserviced meters as the remaining cause.
“The new challenge is that some of the residential meters are no longer working, people tend to abuse their use of water because they know that the council is not billing them.
“I believe it will be manageable. Zesa has managed to do a sterling job with them and I’m sure the same positive results will come out if we decide to introduce them,” said Donald Nyatoti who is the city engineer.
However this has turned up to be a grey sky for Mutare residents who feel that the council has robbed them for long and such a move is not neccesary as much as it was with ZESA.
Zesa is much credible as it supplies the whole city with elctricity and blackouts usually affects almost all of the area and it is a different case with water as high density surbubs such as Dangamvura only recieve water twice in a week.
"The Dangamvura pipeline is the one that we are still working on. We need high pressure pipes. We are left with about two kilometres to cover,” confirmed Nyatoti.
How can they then install prepaid meters yet other residential areas are not recieving water supplies. Cant they just be fair enough and take their time to complete their ten year old project that has and is still facing challenges of completion.
The Mutare City Council should rather make efforts to reservice the water meters especially in Sakubva and continue to with ther normal billing strategy
....the voice of wasu speaks
Well, pre-paid water meters could be necessary if the City Council is done with the piping of other residence (as they are saying) and servicing unworking meters. Pre-paid system help the council to reduce costs of recovering rate charges. It also helps it to quickly raise finance to service & supplying water to every residence which will be beneficial to residents too.
ReplyDeleteResidents will only use what they paid for & thus helping in debt management. On that point as mentioned in the text that residents feel that they have been robbed...it's not necessarily that because it's upto government (the city council in this case) to decide what is sufficient water, for it is a policy issue. Legally speaking, there is nothing unconstitutional about pre-paid water meters as the right there is of 'access' to water, so the council is not obliged to actually provide residents with a certain amount of water eveyday but rather sufficient access to it.
However, the city council should note that it have a public duty to provide residents with reliable and efficient municipal services such as water in this case therefore, it have to maintain sustainable standards in its supply of water.