28 AugCouncil Is Selling Harare Air, and the Receipts Don’t Add Up
On 5 August 2026, the City of Harare and its water contractor, Helcraw Water, admitted something residents had been filming for months: prepaid water meters have been charging people for air.
Not a metaphor. The gas you’re breathing right now. It’s a decent scandal on its own, but it’s really just the most photogenic symptom of something bigger: a US$138 million-plus infrastructure deal, a High Court challenge that could halt the whole programme, a company chaired by a sitting MP, and a city that loses roughly six litres in every ten it treats before a single one reaches a paying customer. The air isn’t the disease. It’s the bit that made a good video.
Here’s how the billing actually works, where the water really goes, who benefits, and what you can practically do about it, starting with the one move that cuts your water bill this month regardless of what council does next.
How a meter learns to bill you for nothing
Prepaid and conventional meters both work by spinning an impeller as water passes through, converting rotations into a reading. The meter can’t tell water from air. When an intermittent line is shut off and restored, the empty pipe fills with air before it fills with water, and that pressurised air spins the impeller exactly as water would. Given how often Harare’s pipes run dry and refill, this isn’t a rare edge case, it’s closer to a monthly certainty.
“Compressed air travelling through the distribution network may also cause the impeller to rotate, resulting in registration of apparent consumption.”
City of Harare and Helcraw Water, joint statement, 5 August 2026
It isn’t unique to prepaid meters, but a disputed estimate could once be challenged before paying. Under prepaid, the deduction happens instantly, out of money already handed over, and Zimbabwe has been here before: ZESA got there first, and residents have spent years working out how to manage shared prepaid electricity meters.
Council spokesperson Stanley Gama insists “there is no shortchanging of residents at all,” even as residents report US$20 to US$40 vanishing in days with no water. We found demands for compensation, but no confirmed case of an actual refund.
The number that actually matters: 60%
Roughly 60% of the water Harare’s treatment works produce never reaches a paying customer, so-called non-revenue water (NRW), a figure that’s held steady for years, well before the first prepaid meter went in.
NRW splits into two buckets that matter here: physical losses (burst mains, ageing joints, a network largely built for a city of 300,000 that’s now home to roughly 4.5 million), and commercial losses (illegal connections, unmetered use, faulty meters, database gaps). Prepaid meters attack only the second bucket. They cannot fix a burst main. If the bulk of that 60% is physical, which every account of the network’s condition suggests, a perfectly accurate meter still sits downstream of most of the problem.
Council’s own June 2026 targets: cut NRW to 30 to 35%, lift production from 350 to 520 megalitres a day, take collection efficiency from 48% to 90%. What’s missing is a matching account of how much of the roughly 5,000km network has actually been replaced, the figures we found run to tens of kilometres, not that scale. Nor has council restated the NRW figure since the air controversy broke in August.
Who’s actually running this
The rollout runs on a Build-Operate-Transfer deal between Harare and Helcraw Water, with Chinese partner Hangzhou Laison Technology, procured through the Ministry of Local Government, not council alone. This is a deal central government brokered and council implements: there’s no real daylight between “council” and “government” here.
As reported by The Zimbabwe Independent and Bulawayo24, Helcraw is chaired by Farai Jere, ZANU-PF MP for Murehwa West, and multiple outlets report the contract went ahead without competitive tender, after Helcraw had previously lost a smaller, US$2 million tender in 2023 on capacity grounds. Opposition legislators and residents’ groups have publicly asked how that happened. We’re reporting that question because others on record have asked it, not asserting an answer ourselves. Worth noting: the same ministry previously forced through the contested Pomona dumpsite deal, which drew its own “corruption” tag in local reporting at the time. Read together, this looks less like a one-off.
The money, as reported: US$138,157,700 mobilised as part of a roughly US$1.54 billion programme, recovered partly via a flat monthly charge said to run US$5.50 to US$6 across roughly 350,000 ratepayers for five to ten years, on top of consumption top-ups. We could not confirm whether that levy is actually being billed yet, treat it as a reported term, not a confirmed charge. Gama also calls prepaid revenue “ring-fenced,” his claim, not an independently audited fact; no such audit has been published.
The court case, and the constitutional point
In June 2026, Mabelreign ratepayer Bernadette Makaya, represented by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, filed a High Court application to halt the rollout, arguing the Urban Councils Act and 1913 Harare Water By-Laws only ever contemplated post-paid billing, that prepaid’s instant cut-off breaches the Act’s mandatory 24-hour disconnection notice, and that council never properly consulted residents before imposing it. The case is being watched as a template for whether Bulawayo and other cities go the same way, so it’s deciding more than one city’s water policy at once. For what a fully broken system looks like, see our earlier look at Bulawayo’s water crisis.
There’s a constitutional angle too: Section 77 guarantees a right to safe, clean water, and a strictly prepaid system means no credit, no water, regardless of the reason for the empty balance. As Harare Residents Trust’s Precious Shumba puts it, prepaid meters don’t increase supply or improve quality, they just change who pays first.
The vanishing borehole
For a long time, a borehole was Harare’s honest Plan B. That’s no longer simple, for three reasons.
Cost: a standard 40-metre borehole runs roughly US$1,300 to US$1,500 for drilling and casing plus an US$80 to US$200 siting survey, but falling water tables mean many rigs now need 60 to 80 metres, at roughly US$30 to US$45 per extra metre. Safety: a 2013 City of Harare study found roughly a third of tested boreholes contaminated, largely from sewage seepage; that figure is thirteen years old and we found no citywide re-test since (for a flavour of how casually siting gets handled, Marondera once had to defend drilling a borehole next to a toilet). And even the backup now has a toll booth: ZINWA charges Harare borehole owners a US$100 fee. ZINWA’s own prepaid water tokens, bought through EcoCash and OneMoney, show prepaid water isn’t new, just not at council scale until now.
If you’re drilling anyway: insist on a proper siting survey, demand a four to six hour stepped yield test before final payment, and test the water at SAZ or a government lab before drinking it untreated.
What this means for your grocery bill
This link is logical rather than directly documented: peri-urban market gardeners around Domboshava, Ruwa and Mazowe depend on the same shallow wells and streams under water-table pressure, so expect tighter volumes and firmer prices on leafy vegetables and tomatoes at Mbare Musika through the dry months. We don’t have 2026 data confirming this yet, so treat it as a reasoned expectation, not a reported trend. Track it against our running Mbare Musika price comparisons.
What water actually costs, and the one thing you can do about it
Council’s prepaid tariff sits at roughly US$2.00 per kilolitre in high-density suburbs (up from US$1.24) and US$4.00 in low-density areas (up from US$1.70, a 188% jump). ZINWA’s own bulk tariff runs roughly US$1 to US$2 per cubic metre, though that needs a fresh 2026 check. Water vendors have been thriving off Harare’s dry taps since at least 2020, so none of this is new. We checked several Harare bulk water and tank suppliers in August 2026 and took the figure that recurred most often for each size, our own typical-price snapshot, not any single supplier’s rate card:
| Volume ordered | Typical delivered price | Roughly, per cubic metre |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 2,500 litres | ~US$40 | ~US$16 |
| 5,000 litres | ~US$50 | ~US$10 |
| 7,500 litres | ~US$70 | ~US$9.30 |
| 10,000 litres | ~US$95 | ~US$9.50 |
| Each additional 5,000 litres | ~US$45 to US$50 | ~US$9 to US$10 |
Even a shaky, air-billing council supply is roughly five to eight times cheaper per litre than a bowser. A bad prepaid meter still usually beats the private water market you get pushed toward when it fails.
| Tank size | Typical purchase price |
|---|---|
| 2,500 litres | ~US$200 |
| 5,000 litres | ~US$270 |
| 10,000 litres | ~US$500 (fewer listings, rougher estimate) |
Here’s the useful part: splitting a bulk order with neighbours roughly halves your effective cost per litre. A solo 2,500-litre top-up pays close to the worst rate on the table, about US$16/m³. But four households pooling one 20,000-litre order, at roughly US$45 to US$50 per additional 5,000 litres past the first tier, works out to roughly US$180 to US$200 total, or about US$45 to US$50 per household for double the water. Agree a shared delivery day with two to four neighbours, each with their own tank (the actual reason to buy one, you can’t take bulk delivery without storage), and split the invoice by tank size received. It takes coordination and someone home to receive it, but it’s the single most concrete cost-saving move available right now, whatever happens with the court case or the meters.
What would actually fix this
- Pool orders with neighbours now. The one lever entirely in residents’ hands today.
- Fix the pipes, not just the meters. Physical losses are the dominant share of that 60%.
- Install air-release and pressure-relief valves at network level, not left to individual households; council and Helcraw say it’s planned, unproven at scale.
- Publish an independent audit of the Helcraw deal and the “ring-fenced” revenue claim.
- Fund a lifeline tariff so prepaid doesn’t function as an ability-to-pay filter on a constitutional right.
- Report installation and NRW numbers consistently. 15,000 meters in March, 18,000 the same month elsewhere, 21,000 soon after, 70,000-plus by June, against a first-phase target reported anywhere from 40,000 to 600,000. That’s not rounding noise, it’s a communications failure.
- Bring Kunzvi Dam online on schedule (reportedly 74 to 84% complete, 158 million m³ capacity, up to 240 megalitres a day via a new Donnybrook works), alongside smaller efforts like the Nanotech work at Morton Jaffray. This is the real fix no amount of metering substitutes for.
- Resolve the disconnection-notice question properly, amend the by-laws or don’t roll out until they do.
The bottom line
The air in your pipes isn’t the scandal, it’s the symptom you can film. The real story is a network losing most of what it produces before a meter can measure it, a deal struck without tender by the same ministry behind the Pomona saga, and a billing model that puts all the risk on residents. Keep your stopcock within reach, keep a record of every air-billing incident, and go halves on your next bulk delivery with the people next door.
