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Lake Chivero, Zimbabwe (Africa)

Perhaps one of the most studied lakes in Africa is Lake Chivero, formerly Lake McIllwaine. The lake was built to supply water to the City of Harare, as well as to serve the irrigation needs of downstream farmers. This case study is chosen to illustrate management failure due to institutional problems. The technological, manpower, legislative, and financial resources for the proper management of Lake Chivero could be marshaled, but in recent years working institutions have been lacking. The failure arose from a lack of clear linkages between stakeholders and administrative structures, as well as failure to forge working partnerships with other institutions, and a lack of public awareness, education and stakeholder participation in the ecological management of the reservoir.

Historical background
Beginning in the mid 1980s, the lake became progressively eutrophic, after a recovery period from a previous eutrophication phase in the mid 1960s. When the lake was constructed, the population of Harare was about 400,000 inhabitants. The urban population of the Lake Chivero watershed now stands at about 1.6 million. As the population grew, the wastewater discharge also increased. Human and livestock populations in the rural part of the catchment also grew. A new urban settlement, now the second largest city in Zimbabwe, mushroomed upstream of the lake to a population of over half a million inhabitants in less than two decades. More recently, with an increase in urban drift, the city has expanded as new residential areas have been established. Due to the highly seasonal nature of the river flow, the dry season flow into the lake consists largely of processed wastewater.

In the late 1960s, the lake became hypereutrophic (Table 6). Before the construction of Lake Chivero, Harare took its water from reservoirs that were upstream of the sewage effluent outflow. When the lake was created, the need to protect the watershed was recognized, and took the form of a recreational wildlife park around the lake. While this measure guarded against siltation from the immediate surroundings of the lake, it did not include the impact of an increasing volume of treated sewage flowing into the lake. In 1974, the City of Harare took further measures to protect the lake by installing a biological nutrient removal sewage treatment plant for its municipal wastewater. Tertiary treatment was effected by use of pastureland where the final effluent was used for irrigation.

For a period of nearly ten years, the lake showed recovery from eutrophic conditions. In the late 1970s, satellite settlements around Harare, particularly Chitungwiza, grew. These settlements did not have the funds to install sophisticated wastewater treatment works, so their wastewater was discharged into the Lake Chivero watershed streams after only primary treatment. By the mid 1980s, the lake had reverted to hypereutrophy. It remains hypereutrophic today, and is beset with a chronic water hyacinth problem and repeated fish kills.

Management issues with respect to Lake Chivero are as follows:

Lack of institutional harmonization
Though Harare is the principal user of the lake water, the management of the lake falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management, which is not represented in the municipal water supply and wastewater management decision-making system. Furthermore, the Department has no facilities for water quality management, as its main interest in the lake is the fishery. The responsibility for water quality monitoring and pollution control was invested in the Ministry of Health. While the city invested heavily in managing wastewaters from its own sewers, it failed to recognize the contribution of satellite settlements as well as rural runoff in the watershed. The regulatory authority for use and management of the lake is invested in a separate department.

Lack of stakeholder participation
There are no established consultative arrangements among the land users of the Lake Chivero watershed for the management of the watershed. Land users in the watershed include commercial farmers, subsistence farmers and urban and local authorities.

Inadequate funding
A problem, perhaps peculiar to developing countries, is the growth of human settlements of limited revenue base, such that the administrative authorities have a limited financial capacity to provide civic works and to maintain services. Consequently, waste management works tend to be under-funded.

Failure to appreciate watershed dimensions of the problem.
Though there were possibilities of use of wetlands and other impoundments within the catchment to manage overland runoff, the lack of a holistic watershed approach led to a failure to maximize opportunities for the restoration of the lake's water quality.

Lack of public awareness
While the concept of public awareness and participation is increasingly recognized in natural resource management, in the case of Lake Chivero public awareness and participation were viewed as threats to the workings of the municipal authority. Information on water quality of the lake and that of the water delivered to consumers is not readily available. Members of the public thus remained ignorant of their role in the eutrophication of the lake and how they could assist in the remedy. The various authorities thus missed an opportunity for public support in their disparate attempts to arrest the eutrophication trend in the reservoir.

Legal framework failure
The political institutions did not appear to be concerned about the deteriorating water quality of the lake. Elected councilors seemed to be ignoring breaches of municipal environmental by-laws, and in some cases encouraged such breaches to retain popularity with an ill-informed electorate. The civic authority’s strategy was limited to passing the rising operational costs of potable water production to middle class ratepayers, an electoral minority. Environmental advocacy by the public was poorly developed and politically ineffective. Thus, while a legal framework existed both at national and local levels in the form of various acts and bylaws, the political leadership was unwilling to enforce the legislation.

Failure to forge partnerships
In the 1970s, the Municipality had a collaborative research program with the University in which the Municipality funded research programs aimed at solving water quality management problems. In the post independence period, these links were discontinued, and so was the research into possible technical innovations in eutrophication management. The Municipality also failed to take advantage of developments in industry, which, over the years had developed an environmental program of its own, as evidenced at the CemZim 99 Environmental Management Conference, organized by the Environmental Forum of Zimbabwe. Most significant, however, was the failure of the various urban and local authorities to cooperate in the lake's environmental management.

The management status of Lake Chivero, as a case study of institutional failure, can perhaps be defined by comparing its management to guidelines outlined in “Environment and development in Africa: Tools for implementing environmentally sustainable developmentEin Table 7.

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