Toxic gases that have built up at neglected water purification plants and in sewers have killed at least nine municipal technicians across Zimbabwe as misgovernance and migration of chemistry expertise takes its toll.
Experts have blamed what they call a dysfunctional state. In recent years, Zimbabwe’s urban municipalities inability to pay good wages has pushed those with chemistry skills to leave for the UK or South Africa, they say.
‘What makes this tragic is that these are needless, preventable deaths,’ says Tonde Mombeshora, a Zimbabwean-born chemist at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, pointing to the deaths of three water treatment technicians in Harare in November after attempting to enter a decommissioned water purification plant.
Gases that pose a risk of suffocation, such as methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, can build up in water treatment plants due to the decomposition of organic materials in waste. In Zimbabwe, where appropriate safety measures can be absent, these plants need to have sensors to detect these gases, Mombeshora adds.
The three technicians who died in November are part of a growing number of recent fatalities across Zimbabwe’s cities and towns, says Shadreck Gauro, an activist with the Combined Municipal Workers Union of Zimbabwe. He says that some deaths are occurring with little publicity. The recent fatalities follow an incident in August when two technicians from Harare City’s water division lost their lives after exposure to what the mayor called ‘toxic sewer gas’ at a water treatment plant. Other incidents include two municipal technicians suffocating in a sewer in Gweru, the country’s third-largest city, and two council workers dying in Kadoma, a central Zimbabwe city – both in November 2024.
‘While authorities say that these deadly plants are decommissioned, the reality is they are not decommissioned, but they are just plants which have been left idle, neglected,’ Mombeshora says.
Mombeshora, who is also a consultant on the safe remediation of sewers for some of the largest cities in South Africa, says plants need regular maintenance, checks for leakages and ventilation in confined areas, with detectors being calibrated and monitored continuously. Desperation for jobs is rife in Zimbabwe, where, according to the Afrobarometer data verification portal, nearly four in 10 adults say they are unemployed and are looking for jobs, including almost half of young people. It means inexperienced technicians are working for municipalities that are short on funding.
‘If they were trained properly, they should have detected the gases through the sensors,’ Mombeshora says. ‘They would only have gone down to help their distressed colleagues if wearing PPE, respirator masks first. Those things are not there.’
As Zimbabwe’s economy struggles and municipalities can’t pay for skilled personnel, hundreds of environmental technicians and scientists like Mombeshora are believed to have left for the UK, South Africa, Australia or the Middle East. Though the Zimbabwean science ministry says it doesn’t keep a record of how many skilled personnel have emigrated, informal discussions in the country’s chemistry community suggest that the exodus ‘is really deep, we are now scattered all over the world’, Mombeshora says. With the country’s chemistry expertise poached by wealthier nations, enforcement of safety regulations has suffered, he adds. For example, in 2004–2005, when a lucrative bottled water industry grew up in Zimbabwe, authorities were advised that all municipal water treatment plants should have qualified chemists on site, ‘but that’s not happening’, he says. Last year, when he briefly moved back to his native Zimbabwe to do technical consultancy work for mining firms, he says he was distressed to see waste effluent casually discharged into waterways with municipalities not even monitoring whether the discharge flowing into lakes or aquifers was close to where household boreholes are drawing drinking water.
‘We are in deep trouble,’ he says, warning that, unless there is political will to fix infrastructure, more technicians will die.
Chemistry World requested comment from the mayor of Harare and Zimbabwe’s office for local government but received no response.
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