Mwanza discharges polluting Lake Victoria

Mwanza, a city of almost quarter of a million inhabitants on the shores of Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania, was discharging an estimated 65 million litres of untreated industrial effluents into the lake each day, the ‘Guardian’ newspaper reported on Thursday, citing the executive secretary of the Lake Victoria Environmental Management Project, Christopher Nyirabu. ‘The African’ newspaper reported in January that the European Union (EU) was proposing to rehabilitate Mwanza’s main pumping station, near the Mirongo River, from where all the city’s sewage is supposed to be pumped to stabilisation ponds in the Pasiansi area. It cited the monthly EU ‘Newsletter’ as saying that the proposed project would involve the improvement of treatment ponds. Mwanza residents were facing a shortage of quality drinking water due to the city’s poor water system and raw sewage, which was having a huge environmental impact on the area surrounding the city, ‘The African’ reported. “Effluent flows directly into Lake Victoria, endanger people’s health and their livelihoods, such as fishing. Kwimba, Butimba and Songoro are major areas currently heavily polluted,” it said. Much of the water pollution in Lake Victoria was due to untreated municipal and industrial wastes, including sewage, Nyirabu said on Wednesday. There was also an excessive inflow of nutrients from areas under cultivation and grazing, he added. On the control of water hyacinth on the lake, Nyirabu said that over 80 percent of the plant, which had covered 1,000 hectares of lakeside on the Tanzanian shore in 1997, had been removed. Eleven units rearing weevils, which eat into the masses of water hyacinth, were now producing one million weevils a month on the Tanzanian side, he said. Measures were also being taken to bring Rwanda on board in a regional surveillance strategy, since most of the weed coming down [into Tanzania] through the Kagera River originated there, Nyirabu added.