BCC halts market gardening

BULAWAYO City Council has stopped enterprising residents living at suburbs within the vicinity of its water reservoir at Lobengula West to harness water from the basin to irrigate their thriving market gardening projects due to illegal extraction of the resource by some unscrupulous individuals for commercial purposes.

Some residents from New Lobengula, Lobengula West and Old Magwegwe had since last year ventured into thriving market gardening projects through utilising water oozing out from the local authority water reservoir's pipeline breather.

One of the residents, Mr Ian Banda said he has managed to generate income as well as improve household food security since embarking on the horticultural project in August last year.

"I am unemployed so this small garden has enabled me to get at least $2 a day and it enables me to enhance house food security," said Banda who is a father of four.

Mr Banda has cropped spinach, carrots, tomatoes, rape and chomolia on his market garden.

"I anticipate doing crop rotation on this small piece of land and as such if I remove these vegetables I will crop maize," he said.

The horticultural projects are constantly prone to thefts as they are only fenced using twigs.

"We sometimes lose some of our vegetables to thieves and to make matters worse council is seeking to devise a new technology which will ensure that there won't be a breather which will be allowing water to ooze out like these thus this is likely to bring to an end our farming projects," said Mr Banda.

He said the local authority has been incensed into devising a new technology, which would prevent water from coming out through a breather as a result of rampant "water harvesting" by some individuals in the construction industry that invade the source to fetch water for brick moulding and building purposes.

"The councillor (Macdonald Chunga) was recently here with some council officials and indicated that they didn't mind our horticultural projects but expressed disgruntlement on the number of trucks which come here to fetch water for construction activities," said Mr Mpofu.

Clr Chunga said the authority has been forced to bring to a halt the horticultural projects after realising that a number of unscrupulous individuals were siphoning water from the reservoir's breather for commercial purposes.

"I had noticed with concern the rampant misuse of water at that side. A number of kombis (commuter omnibuses) were being washed there and they were some individuals that were harnessing water at that point for construction purposes while in actual fact they should be paying bills for accessing water for their businesses.

"I recently visited the site with our engineers and they also condoned the practice (of rampant harnessing of water for commercial activities). We had no problem with those that were using the water for irrigating their horticultural produce because most of them are elders while some are unemployed and such they were generating some income from the projects," he said.

Department of Agricultural Technical and Extension Services (Agritex) Bulawayo provincial horticultural specialist, Ms Treggie Mpofu said as a department they encouraged people to utilise any water source for agricultural purposes.

"As a department we encourage people to utilise any water source at their disposal if there is an opportunity for them to enhance food security and nutrition and we can always come and conduct training programmes to improve their agricultural enterprises. However, in this case I am not sure if council is in agreement with the residents to carry out cropping activities there," said Ms Mpofu.

She said Agritex would soon distribute tomato and cabbage seedlings to officially recognised market gardens in the city.