FOR years, Harare residents have endured dry taps, burst pipes, emergency repairs and intermittent supply. Prepaid water meters promised transparency and fairness. Instead, a new problem has emerged: residents may be paying for water they never consumed.
The concern follows the City of Harare’s partial shutdown of Morton Jaffray Water Treatment Works and the total shutdown of Warren Control Pump Station for urgent leak repairs and reservoir cleaning.
Nobody disputes the need for maintenance — an ageing system requires it. But Council must answer one question: who pays for the water lost during these interventions?
When supply resumes after an interruption, the water flowing through the pipes is often dirty or discoloured. Residents are forced to run their taps until it clears. That water is wasted — unusable for drinking, cooking, sometimes even laundry. Yet the meter doesn’t distinguish between water that’s fit for use and water flushed down the drain. It simply counts volume.
Residents are also reporting leaks after supply returns, raising concerns that pressure surges are damaging ageing household plumbing.
Residents should not carry the cost of a system they neither designed nor control.
Council cannot expect people to pay for a known infrastructure failure while waiting indefinitely for repairs. It must introduce interim measures: a transparent process for investigating abnormal meter readings, and a mechanism to compensate or credit households that can demonstrate losses from maintenance-related disruptions.
Communication matters too. Before restoring supply, council should tell residents what to expect — the likely quality of the initial water, whether to flush their systems, how long that takes, and what to do if their meter shows unusually high consumption.
Prepaid meters were meant to bring discipline and accountability to water billing. But technology cannot fix broken infrastructure, and a sophisticated meter does not make an unfair billing system fair.
Non-revenue water — water that enters the system but generates no revenue, through leaks, illegal connections and other losses — is a utility-management problem. The responsibility for fixing it rests with the utility, not the consumer.
The principle is simple: residents should pay for the water they use, not the dirty water they’re forced to flush because the utility failed to deliver it properly.
At minimum, the council must compensate or credit residents for water lost flushing contaminated supply after planned maintenance. Anything less means consumers pay twice — once for a service they didn’t receive, and again for the utility’s failure to provide it.
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