Yesterday morning my home inter-com buzzed and a tiny voice asked: “Please sir, may I kindly have some water?” The request comes several times a day, and my neighbours’ children or servants roll in with battered wheelbarrows laden with 20-litre plastic canisters, buckets, aluminium pots and anything else that can hold liquid.

For the past five weeks not a drop of water has come into the Harare suburb where I live via the water treatment system set up 50 years ago. But I am a boon to the neighbourhood. I have a borehole and a pump that sucks clean, cool water out of the earth.

More importantly, I don’t charge. When the water crisis first crept up on the city about two years ago, people offered to pay me. Now, with the supply cut off, I and others with boreholes have become “water Samaritans”.

An Asian businessman has had a tap installed in an elaborate bricked fountain outside his front wall with a large sign saying: “Drinking water. Help yourself.”

On Monday, for the first time, the whole of Harare’s water supply broke down after running out of purifying chemicals. “I was up in my office on the tenth floor and there was nothing to drink and the toilets blocked and stinking,” said Basil, a banker. “I was as helpless as if I were lost in the bush.”

The water crisis is yet another legacy of President Mugabe’s rule. In 2005 his Zanu (PF) party stripped municipal authorities run by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change of control of urban water and sewerage services and set up the Zim-babwe National Water Authority (Zinwa). It was bankrupt almost from the start and had few skilled staff. Water shortages set in rapidly and now nearly every part of this modern city of about two million suffers continual water cuts, from up to a few hours a day to two years, in one township.

The authority had to stop pumping on Monday because it ran out of aluminium sulphate to treat Harare’s water, which comes from Lake Chi-vero just west of the city. Every day about 35 tonnes of raw effluent is pumped from Zinwa’s sewage works, which has now collapsed, into the lake.

People have learnt to cope. It is easier in the suburbs, where many have boreholes. The water of thousands of swimming pools is scooped out in buckets to flush toilets. Manufacturers cannot produce enough large plastic water tanks.

Norma is one of the unlucky ones who lives in a bad area. She is forced to rotate between her friends who have water, dropping in at sunset with a towel, soap and shampoo. She calls it “social bathing”. Gertrude, a nurse, carries in the boot of her car two large canisters and a collection of plastic bottles that she fills up when she makes home calls on patients.

Harare Sports Club allows members to shower in its changing rooms, but was overwhelmed during Monday’s disaster. Members were notified that henceforth they would be charged $2 for a shower.

In the townships, the water turns in a deadly cycle. Months without it mean that toilets are blocked, leading to people defaecating in the open, everywhere, at night. At the same time, the pressure of the trapped sewage is enough to flip open cast-iron manhole covers and spew the contents through the streets, into people’s yards. The stench of faeces is all-pervasive.

The main water supply now comes from thousands of shallow wells dug in people’s tiny backyards, where people queue to fill 20-litre canisters at an extortionate $1 a time. The wells are seldom protected, so the effluent runs straight in.

“This was a modern township, with a functioning reticulated system that pumped clean, safe water into the taps and toilets of every home,” said Pete, an engineer. “Now people are queueing up at primitive hand pumps, like rural villages. Civilisation has gone in reverse.” Some people take a pickaxe to a Zinwa pipeline, and collect the escaped water where it gathers in a pool, supplemented by trickles of sewage.

It has been like this for years, in nearly every poor, crowded township in the country, and inevitably cholera has struck. In two months, there have been more than 11,000 reported cases. The number doubled last week and nearly 600 people have been killed in the outbreak.

A senior Western diplomat said that the true toll of the epidemic could be double the official figure. He accused Robert Mugabe’s regime of “criminal and politically driven neglect” of Zim-babwe’s water and sewerage system.

It is the same in the suburbs, where I see nattily dressed young women walking from the stream that runs through the golf course near me, with buckets balanced on their heads.

Yesterday, for the first time, I saw that a flow of sewage had forged its way down the road, and into the stream running through the golf course.

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