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Pollution at Lake Chivero
Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZCTF)
May 25, 2005

It was brought to our attention that the Harare drinking water which comes from Lake Chivero is not fit for human consumption because raw sewerage is being pumped into the lake.

Since the onset of the land reform programme, the people who previously worked on farms in the rural areas have moved into the main centres in search of employment and the sewerage system can no longer efficiently cope with the waste of the increased population. The raw sewerage now goes directly into Lake Chivero. This has been the case for the past few years but the problem is now critical reports of people being hospitalized for stomach ailments are becoming more and more frequent.

I went out to the lake and took some pictures of the water which are attached. There is a terrible stench of human excrement emanating from the water.

I contacted the Harare branch of the World Health Organization who passed me from one person to another. In the end, I was told that they couldn't do anything about it and I should contact the Government Water Resources Task Force but I couldn't get through to them. I then tried the Municipality who were not interested. In desperation, I contacted the media and took a team of journalists and photographers out to the lake who published the story and photos in one of our local newspapers.

We would like to urge Harare residents to boil all their drinking water because there doesn't seem to be any solution to this problem at the moment.

Poaching in Lake Chivero
We recently sent out a report about poaching in Lake Chivero and the outcome of this was that National Parks did a raid and 15 poachers were arrested and were fined 2.5 million dollars each. A large quantity of nets and several boats which had been utilized in their poaching operations were recovered.

Unethical hunting
Dendales, formerly Eden Hunt Safaris is a 16 000 hectare game farm, 40 km from Chihoyi on the Sanyati Road which is home to about 100 elephant and a large number of plainsgame of varying species. The owner, Charles Ridley was evicted and the ranch was taken over by a relative of a prominent ZANU PF minister.

The new settler of Dendales is now selling hunts on the property and hunters are invited to shoot as much as they want. No hunting quota has been issued and 3 professional hunters have already been there and shot 2 elephants and a substantial number of plainsgame. We have the names of these hunters on record if anybody is interested. A simple phone call is all that is required to hunt there.

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