Harare: dirty city, dirty politics, dirty black gold

One such solution that can be adopted is the city council establishing a “city compost programme”. City compost programmes are when cities actively adopt a plan to establish composting sites in as many areas as possible within the city, usually based at community centres, schools, hospitals or farmers’ markets.

Over 50% of municipal waste in most average developing countries is organic, meaning it can be turned into compost. City compost programmes have the benefit of diverting food waste from landfills, reducing methane emissions and producing compost. 

Compost is crucial for Harare’s economic ecosystem, as about 10% of land in the capital is used for urban agriculture.  Due to the Ukraine war, global synthetic fertiliser prices have increased by over 100%, which means most urban farmers will not be able to afford fertiliser in the upcoming farming season. 

Compost fertiliser costs about seven to nine times less than synthetic fertiliser. This will create a virtuous environmental cycle in which citizens dispose of their waste in a responsible way to create dirty black gold. 

Additionally, establishing a city composting programme provides a chance to decentralise and democratise how Harare deals with waste. Structurally speaking, the reason Geogenix is interested in the Pomona deal is that a city of about two million people structurally relies on dumping all their waste in one area. This is a conducive structure for the monopolisation of an industry that elitist capitalism relies on to maximise profits.

Establishing decentralised composting programmes that compost at the source of waste will weaken Zimbabwe’s government’s hold on city councils. A decentralised waste system will increase citizen participation in an important issue, cultivating democratic structures of social ownership from below. 

It is easy to imagine each of the 47 wards in Harare having at least two compost sites, with other compost sites at famous farmers’ markets such as Mbare Musika. 

By Kuda Manjonjo for NewZWire

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