FOR weeks entire suburbs of Zimbabwe’s second city have been running on empty taps as an acute water shortage forces residents to queue for hours, sleep at communal boreholes and fetch from open wells and ponds that health experts warn are breeding grounds for deadly disease.
Bulawayo City Council has operated rolling water shedding schedules and emergency rationing as the six dams that supply the city remain critically low. A parliamentary review in June found daily demand for the city at about 165 mega litres while current supply capacity sat near 120 mega litres, leaving a persistent deficit that has stretched the council’s ability to maintain reticulated supply.
Residents in Pumula, Nkulumane, Emganwini and parts of Pelandaba describe stretches of “weeks without a drop” from household taps. With municipal tanker deliveries irregular, many turn to whatever source is closest. Journalists and aid reports over the past year have documented long queues at shallow wells and families drawing water from unprotected pans and riverbanks where human and animal activity contaminate water within hours.
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Public health specialists warn that using unprotected surface water dramatically raises the odds of contracting water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery and other forms of acute diarrhoea. Zimbabwe’s recent history underlines the risk. A nationwide cholera emergency that began in 2023, first reported from Chegutu in February that year, had by April 2024 recorded more than 31 000 cases and 597 deaths, according to WHO situation reporting. Those outbreaks were concentrated in several provinces but highlighted how quickly contaminated water can trigger mass illness.
Bulawayo itself has seen worrying spikes in diarrhoeal disease. Local reporting in mid-2024 placed the city’s cases in the hundreds, with some neighbourhoods declaring local outbreaks linked by residents to bad tap supply and fall-back use of unsafe sources. Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health continued to record high numbers of common diarrhoea cases nationally into 2025. A weekly surveillance post on 1 June 2025 showed 4 263 common diarrhoea cases and six deaths for that reporting week.
Doctors say children under five and the elderly are the most vulnerable. Without immediate access to safe water, families are forced to ration drinking and hygiene water, reducing hand-washing and sanitation. These conditions amplify disease transmission. Clinicians warn that delayed treatment for severe diarrhoea can quickly become fatal through dehydration, especially where access to oral rehydration salts and functioning clinics is limited.
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City authorities point to ageing infrastructure, population growth and drought-driven low dam levels as root causes, and have appealed for government assistance and donor support to rehabilitate boreholes, repair pipelines and expand storage capacity. Independent researchers and civic groups say a combination of immediate relief through treated water trucking, mobile chlorination and community education, together with medium-term investment in repairs and alternative supplies, is urgently needed.
For now residents are left balancing impossible choices: wait at empty taps and risk dehydration at home, or drink from risky sources and face the real possibility of diarrhoea outbreaks that in Zimbabwe’s recent past have claimed lives. Public health experts say the longer safe municipal supplies remain interrupted, the greater the chance that isolated cases will cascade into community-wide emergencies.
