WITH flies hovering all over the vicinity of the crowded slums of Epworth, an urban settlement approximately 25km east of the Zimbabwean capital Harare, laden plastic paper bags lie scattered on streets and sidewalks, with children rummaging through garbage and vendors going about their normal business oblivious to the wafting stench of human waste. Tambudzai Munondo (45), one of the residents of Epworth, strangely, says they have become used to co-exist with human waste. “Most of these homes you see here have no toilets and it’s now common for people to relieve themselves in the open or in plastic bags or even old newspapers in which they wrap up their waste and just throw anywhere,” Munondo, a single mother of five, told Anadolu Agency. The trend of switching to open defecation has also become common even in Harare’s central business district. Reckson Mavaviro, a 27-year-old money changer, said the city’s public toilets are apparently not open to the public anymore. Public toilets out of order in towns “People just sneak behind disused city buildings to relieve themselves in the open even during the day and this is a serious cause of concern. You see us working here in the open and think we have toilets to relieve ourselves. There is nothing of that sort anymore; people just abandon their mess anywhere now,” Mavaviro told Anadolu Agency. A top health officer working for the Harare City Council, on condition of anonymity, said: “Open defecation is not a new phenomenon because the council has no capacity to maintain the existing public toilets that stopped working years ago.” Another official in the Health ministry, requesting anonymity, said: “Local authorities in urban areas are to blame for the open defecation problem in cities and towns and the council authorities should invest more in addressing the worsening sanitation crisis before it reaches a catastrophic level.” Open defecation worse in urban slums Yet not far from the country’s capital, in Epworth, the situation is even worse and residents of the slums here, like Munondo, have had to contend with the rot without complaining anymore. Even as residents in parts of Epworth have tried to construct pit latrines, owing to council by-laws which prohibit urban dwellers from erecting such makeshift structures, they have had no alternative except to now turn to unorthodox ways of relieving themselves — the plastic bags and the unoccupied open spaces. In Harare’s old low-income suburbs like Mabvuku, east of the capital, without running water for years, open defecation has become the way to go for residents there, this amid obsolete sewer pipes. “In Mabvuku’s Chizhanje Street, people are now defecating in the maize fields near houses because our local authority has failed to repair the sewerage blockages,” Reuben Akili, programmes manager for the Combined Harare Residents Trust (CHRA), said. Rural-to-urban migration fuel problem But urban planners, like James Ganyani based in Harare, said: “High concentration of population in towns has meant pressure on resources like