Online Reporter
The switch to prepaid water meters countrywide, starting in Harare where it will be part of a major public-private partnership to sort out the whole problem of treatment, distribution and sewerage, is obviously required, but can give maximum benefit and ease of operation if everyone keeps in mind the householders buying water.
Payment in advance means that everyone pays so that the company treating and distributing the water does not have to worry about bad debts, and the advance payments should mean that there is enough working capital to buy treatment chemicals in advance and have a proper response for pipe bursts as well as make budgeting easier for the longer-term investments in refurbishing water works and pump stations, and a proper replacement cycle for water mains, as well as adding capacity.
Few will disagree so long as water is fairly priced, with the prices explained, and is readily available and of a respectable safe standard.
Harare City Council did toy with pre-paid water meters some years ago with several offered systems tried out in four suburbs.
The experiment was discontinued without any attempt to work out what might have been the best system and the council decided that prepaid water was a no-go and instead wanted to continue with extremely intermittent supplies and a lot of people not paying even for these.
The systems being tried out imposed a lot of problems on water users. For a start they were built around a card that had to be charged in a designated municipal office during municipal working hours.
Besides the problems of cards being lost or wallets stolen, this meant that if you ran out at say 4pm on a Friday you could not buy water without a trip into the city centre on Monday morning.
Zesa has many problems, but has created a largely user-friendly and trouble free set of payment systems for its prepaid metres, and thus set standards for the new systems that will be set for paying water bills.
While people can buy tokens at Zesa banking halls, and this is how it started, and then at agents, which were operating in many suburbs, the big breakthrough came when Zesa installed software that allowed users to buy electricity 24/7 via their online bank account and, in the most user-friendly advance, via their mobile money account on their phone.
From the very beginning customers did not need their physical cards, and by now many have been lost, so long as they had the meter number recorded and almost everyone has this in a notebook or on a piece of paper or recorded as a contact in their phone.
Besides needing it to buy energy, you also need it for other Zesa dealings, such a recording a fault.
The modern payment systems mean that you can usually buy a token from home, if you wish to, in the middle of the night, most useful if you see your meter has only one or two units left. Even if you have allowed your prepaid power to run out you can still buy a token and almost everyone can plug in their meter next door at the nearest neighbour to activate that token.
Admittedly in some ultra-low density suburbs the nearest neighbour is out of range, but everyone in a flat, cluster house, high and medium density suburb has that useful fall-back.
The other useful point about the Zesa cardless and mobile money system is that anyone knowing the meter number can buy a token for their granny at the other end of Zimbabwe and text it across in a minute or two, boosting the convenience.
A second major problem that must be addressed is the fixed monthly water charge that appears on rate bills. This dates back decades when it was introduced as a minimum amount of water that public health medical experts set for a healthy average family. Doctors did not want people trying to save money by using too little water.
These days it is simply unfair, especially when water supplies are intermittent and when households need to be careful how they use water.
If a household chooses brief showers over deep baths and harvests rainwater from the roof for laundry and garden, and even if it buys drinking water in bottles, it should be encouraged in such conservation and not forced to buy water it never uses.
Public health education these days lays down that people should wash themselves and their food and drink enough, not how much they should use doing so. The minimum thus needs to go.
At the same time the bulk meters for blocks of flats need to be all converted to single unit meters, so that every household can manage its own supplies.
Pricing will be debated. We think it is vital that there is a proper neutral regulator in place before the meters are installed and the water is piped in and sold. Zera does this work for Zesa and in the petroleum industry and generally has been doing a good job, insisting on proper costing and checking out these costs.
The most important part of regulation is to allow a highly efficient concern to make a modest profit, the stress being on efficient and modest, after proper investment is costed in to expand production.
It is vital that consumers are not exploited by profiteering, but equally important that the supplier is not allowed to be paid for inefficiency.
Water supply has to be a monopoly and in Harare the way it is organised means that the supplier will need to operate in five local authorities: Harare, Chitungwiza, Ruwa, Epworth and Norton.
This huge operational area and market will mean that the system needs to work, and that the huge needed investments not made for the past quarter century are made, and the maintenance neglected is caught up.
None of this will be cheap and that is why the regulator is needed and approval given not just for tariffs, but also for setting timelines for each set of needed investments plus a rational capital return that is both reasonable and which encourages efficiency.
