At the bottom of a deep pit, a woman ladled grey liquid into plastic drums.

It did not smell too bad and her family had not become sick, even after drinking it for the past two months. “Some people say it is sewage, but they may be making it up,” she said as she heaved a 25 litre (5½ gallon) drum up the slope and into a wheelbarrow.

In any case she, like many of the poorest people in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo did not have a choice: no water has flowed through the pipes in some neighbourhoods since July.

A water expert who accompanied The Times to one of several boreholes in the impoverished Cowdray Park area of the city said that the liquid at the bottom of the pit was indeed sewage that had seeped through the soil from a nearby treatment plant.

As the level of ground water sinks, the thousands who come to find water are forced to dig their impromptu wells ever deeper. All around were puddles and holes.

Critics of President Mugabe say that he is using water as a tool of political repression. In the early summer heat of the semi-arid western provinces of Matabeleland, the city of about 800,000 people is fast running out of water. Three of its five main reservoirs have dried up. The fourth is expected to be empty next month and the last one will be able to supply only 16 per cent of the city’s already tightly rationed needs. “If we have even a mediocre rainy season this summer we are faced with the spectre of Bulawayo literally shutting down,” said David Coltart, MP of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

The water crisis is a dangerous extra strain on Bulawayo, which is already reeling from the country’s hyperinflation, critical shortages of basic food and electricity supplies, and the political repression witnessed in the rest of the country.

Church and political leaders believe that Mr Mugabe is determined to let Bulawayo wither without water. The Government has ignored repeated appeals for help.

The city is the largest urban area in the country to be controlled by a council of the Movement for Democratic Change. “The problem is political,” said the Reverend Kevin Thomson, a leading figure in Churches In Bulawayo, an alliance of the city’s churches, which has begun an emergency water supply operation in the townships.

“They don’t want to fix the problem. Just as they control the supply of food for political purposes, water has become another area for controlling people.”

Already, most homes get a few hours’ water for two days a week, at not much more than a trickle. Showers are a luxury, baths unheard of. Large trees in gardens are dying. In the city’s crowded townships, water distribution has become the predominant activity, with people carrying heavy 25 litre plastic drums on their heads, in wheelbarrows and on two-wheeled donkey-drawn carts.

Residents start queueing at midnight at the big hand pumps that pull water from boreholes drilled by the city council.

“I go to the borehole at 7am,” said Martha Sibanda in Luveve township. “I get back at 4 pm. Just one 25 litre. I have ten people in my house. The water that comes in two days per week, it is not enough for cooking, drinking and washing, but it is flushing the toilet that uses the most.”

Forty-four gallon fuel drums, big plastic dustbins, portable plastic containers and buckets have disappeared from shops, but are touted on the black market for up to Z$13 million (£26). The black market has also just seized on a new opportunity, with 20 litres of water going for up to Z$50,000. There is deep alarm over the likelihood of outbreaks of cholera. “We have an unprecedented convergence in Bulawayo of lack of water, no food, worsening poverty, disease and a high incidence of HIV-Aids [about 17 per cent of adults up to 45],” Mr Coltart said. “No other country in the world is experiencing a situation like that.” Despite Bulawayo’s constant insecurity over its water supplies, the Government has provided no new sources of water since it came to power in 1980. “We wrote to the minister responsible for water for two months about the looming disaster,” said an official of Churches In Bulawayo. “There was neither acknowledgement of, nor any reply to, our letters.”

Instead the Minister, Munacho Mutezo, declared that the Government would not intervene in the water crisis until the city council allowed his – corrupt and incompetent – ministry to take over the city’s water management.

The council has also asked the Government to declare Bulawayo a “water disaster area”, which would allow the council to commandeer water supplies from private boreholes. The request has been ignored.

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