Harare — ZIMBABWE is entering its rainy season, a time that most welcome but also the time when cholera bacteria that have managed to survive the dry seasons are washed into rivers, puddles and wells and are able to start breeding again.

Last year Harare and Chitungwiza were hit by Zimbabwe's most severe cholera outbreak on record.

This was not the usual scattering of a score of cases here at that village and a dozen there in a homestead.

This was an outbreak that infected tens of thousands of people. And it hit, particularly badly, the southwestern suburbs and the far eastern suburbs of the city, the areas that usually go short of clean, safe water when the city cannot supply enough.

More particularly, it hit the poorer suburbs in these areas, suburbs where few can just climb into a car with some drums and collect water from a safe borehole or from taps in more fortunate suburbs. These people, when hit by water shortages, have to use wells, and usually unprotected or temporary wells.

The worst of last year's city outbreak, in Budiriro, started with contamination of just one well. Soon almost every unsealed source of water in the suburb was contaminated.

Last year's outbreak might be considered an unavoidable tragedy, if one was charitable. A recurrence this year would be little short of mass murder. We know what the problem is; we know how to fight it. All we need is the will to do so.

Beating cholera is simple. People need safe clean water for drinking, cooking and washing. We need to keep sewage away from all water supplies. It sounds simple. And it is. No fancy engineering is required, no 21st century technology. The problem was licked in the 19th century in most great cities, and even in small colonial villages like Fort Salisbury, the original centre of Harare.

The primary leader of the battle must be Harare City Council. It wanted the city's water and sewage systems back, it got them back and now must ensure that we never have a repeat of last year's disaster.

The city notes, and we agree, for years no capital was invested in new waterworks, and no new sewage processing plants were built, despite the relentless and rapid increase in the city population.

So the city cannot meet all demand, even if all plants are running flat out.

And then emergencies arise. The latest appears to be some sort of electricity fault. The city and Zesa have had a public argument over whose fault this might be. That is not important. What is important is to fix it.

But even more importantly is the need for the city council to have a set of schemes for ensuring that everyone can have some clean water every day. If there is a problem, it must work round it, cutting rations, but not cutting off swathes of suburbs for days at a time.

We have noted, time and again, that Bulawayo, facing far worse shortages, has always managed to get limited supplies of clean water to every household every day. It might not be a lot of water, but it is enough and Zimbabwe's second city has never had to create emergency cholera wards and fill cemeteries with cholera dead.

Harare City Council can do the same. Rotational cuts, water bowsers and borehole supplies can share what water is available on any particular day equitably. The crucial commitment is to ensure that no one goes without any water in any 24-hour period.

For many areas, simply ensuring that there is a supply of a few hours a day from the taps would be enough.

Some very high areas might need water bowsers or even boreholes feeding local reservoirs.

At the same time the city council needs to take its water restrictions seriously. Hunting down water wasters and those using city water in hosepipes would be a good start. It would mean a lot more to ration out fairly.

We are sure that the council's own experts can come up with workable schemes; after all their counterparts in Bulawayo did and the council just had to implement these.

The bottom line is that the city must act, and must take responsibility.

Looking for others to blame is neither effective nor useful. If Zesa is a problem, then sort it out rather than grasping at an excuse not to deliver.

If there are other problems, then these too must be fixed. Blame games do not bring people back to life, or keep people out of cholera wards.

We hope the city council will grasp its responsibilities, fight to get the maximum amount of water processed each day and then share this water as fairly as possible so that no one goes without at least the basic daily minimum.