The Bulawayo City Council (BCC) yesterday said it would continue disconnecting water from debtors to force them to pay despite the ongoing water shedding as the local authority needed the revenue.
Report by Blondie Ndebele
BCC director of finance Kempton Ndimande was speaking at the local authority’s stakeholders’ corporate planning workshop at a local hotel in response to pleas by participants to stop the disconnections over unpaid water bills.
“For the city council to develop, the residents have to pay,” he said. “We are disconnecting water because there is nothing else that can be done. It’s the last resort.”
However, one of the participants explained that failure by residents to pay water bills was not deliberate, but was due to economic circumstances beyond their control.
“It is not that the residents are irresponsible, but it’s because of economic hardships that we are all facing,” she said.
Meanwhile, responding to questions at the same workshop, town clerk Middleton Nyoni said council had since dismissed a proposal to build prefabricated houses as a way of reducing the city’s housing backlog. “We have not considered the prefabricated approach to housing because it uses sub-standard materials and once we allow that, these will become permanent slum settlements,” Nyoni said.
