Serve Us Before You Move Us: The Women of Lubimbi and the Price of the Gwayi-Shangani Dam
A dam Bulawayo has waited decades for is nearly built — and to fill it, some 502 families in Binga’s Ward 20 must move again, many for the third or fourth time in their lives. The women of Lubimbi have one clear demand: build the water, the schools and the clinics first. Because when a family is dumped on unserviced land, it is women who walk the extra miles for water, and girls who drop out when the school goes under. Move us if you must — but do not move us into a harder life.
This entry is filed in the Women & Girls Journal, cross-listed with Environmental & Conservation, because it sits exactly where those two worlds meet: a major piece of national infrastructure, and the women who will carry its human cost. It is not an argument against the Gwayi-Shangani Dam — that dam may be one of the most important things Zimbabwe builds this decade. It is an argument about how a just nation moves its own people, and about whose voice gets heard when the bulldozers arrive.
Here is what is happening. In Lubimbi, Ward 20 of Binga, the women of the community have made a plain, dignified demand: that the government provide water, schools, health facilities, housing, compensation and real economic opportunity at the resettlement site before families are moved to make way for the rising waters of the Gwayi-Shangani Dam. Their reasoning is precise and impossible to argue with. In their community, as in most, it is women who fetch the water, women who care for the children, women who hold the household together. Move a family onto unserviced land, and you do not inconvenience an abstraction — you multiply the daily labour of specific women, and you interrupt the schooling of specific girls. They are asking not to be moved into a harder life.
The People the Lake Will Displace
Behind the demand are real numbers, and they deserve to be seen before the water rises over them.
The Gwayi-Shangani Dam is a genuine national priority — once impounded it will be Zimbabwe’s third-largest inland water body, feeding drought-prone Bulawayo through a planned 245-kilometre pipeline, a lifeline that city has waited for since the scheme was first conceived generations ago. Construction is past 70%, with the President directing US$5 million released monthly to push it to completion by 2027. Nobody in Lubimbi is disputing that Bulawayo needs water. What they are disputing is that their sacrifice for that water should come without their services, their compensation, or their consent. A city’s thirst is real. So is a village’s dignity. A just plan honours both.
When the Services Are Missing, Women Pay the Difference
It would be easy to file this as a generic “community relocation” story. The women of Lubimbi are insisting we do not — because a displacement without services does not fall equally on everyone. It falls, disproportionately and predictably, on them and their daughters. Here is the arithmetic of that unequal burden.
Their message, as reported, is not a protest against progress. It is a warning grounded in lived experience: moving families to the proposed resettlement area without adequate services would increase their workload — precisely because women carry the water, the children and the household. So they ask, before a single family is moved, for the settlement to be made livable: water, schools, healthcare, housing, fair compensation, and a way to earn.
“Relocation is not simply about moving households.” It is about whether a woman arrives in a place where she can raise her children with dignity — or one where every ordinary task has become a longer, harder walk. That is the difference between resettlement and abandonment.
A Community Moved, and Moved, and Moved Again
To understand why Lubimbi’s demand carries such weight, you have to know that for many of these families, this is not a first displacement. It is the latest chapter in a long history of being moved to make way for someone else’s project — a pattern of sacrifice borne, again, by some of the country’s most marginalised people.
And there is a wound deeper even than the lost homes. In earlier consultations, community leaders urged the government to address the relocation of ancestral graves — because for the people of this land, to leave the dead behind under rising water is not a logistical problem but a spiritual rupture. Ziva kwawakabva — know where you came from — is not a slogan here; it is lived through the graves of the forebears. A relocation that drowns the ancestors without ceremony or care severs a people from their own lineage. Any just plan must carry the dead with the living, with the dignity both are owed.
A Needed Dam, and a Duty That Comes With It
This platform keeps its honest ledger even when sympathy is easy. So let us be fair to every side of this. The government’s case is real, and there are signs of good intent that deserve acknowledgement — even as the community’s fears remain legitimate.
How to Move a People Justly
The women have already written the policy; the state need only honour it. Here is what a just relocation requires — and what the rest of us should watch for.
The Lubimbi Test — Services Before the Move
- Water first, and everywhere. Boreholes and reticulation completed and working at the resettlement site before a single family arrives — because a woman should never have to walk further for water than she does today.
- Schools ready before the old ones drown. The replacement for Lubimbi Primary (and secondary provision) open and staffed before the lake rises — so no child, and especially no girl, loses a year of learning to the water.
- Clinics and healthcare in place. A functioning clinic at the new site, so women are not turned into the entire health system by default.
- Fair, transparent, timely compensation. Clear answers on who moves, when, and what they receive — in writing, in advance, in a language and form the community fully understands.
- The graves, handled with dignity. Proper, consulted, ceremonially respectful relocation of ancestral graves — carrying the dead with the living, honouring ziva kwawakabva.
- Women and girls at the table. Because they carry the heaviest cost, they must have a real voice in the planning — not be consulted after the decisions are made.
Progress That Breaks Its Women Is Not Progress
I want to hold this with the fairness it deserves, because it would be cheap to turn a genuine national project into a simple villain. Bulawayo’s people have suffered real thirst for a very long time, and the Gwayi-Shangani Dam is, on its own terms, a good and necessary thing. I will not pretend otherwise, and neither do the women of Lubimbi. That is what makes their demand so powerful — it is not the reflexive “no” of people against progress. It is the wiser “yes, but do it right” of people who have been moved before and know exactly how these things go wrong.
And they know because they have lived it. Twice, three times, some of them — moved for a cold storage project, moved for Kariba, and now moved for Bulawayo’s pipeline. Each time, the nation took something it needed from them, and each time the question is whether it gave back the conditions of a decent life. That is the test of a country’s soul, and it is a gendered test, because when the services are missing it is not the minister who walks for the water — it is the woman of the house, and the girl who should be in school. A development plan that quietly transfers its costs onto the backs of the poorest women is not modern and it is not proud. It is the oldest injustice wearing a hard hat.
So my charge is simple, and it is the women’s own: serve them before you move them. Dig the boreholes, build the school, staff the clinic, pay the compensation, move the graves with reverence, and put the women in the room where it is decided. Do that, and Zimbabwe will have shown that it can build a dam without breaking a people — that its progress has room in it for the dignity of a woman in Binga as much as the comfort of a city. That is the only progress worth the name. A nation is not measured by the height of its dam wall, but by how it treats the people it asks to move for it. Simudzai vakadzi, murege kuvaremedza — lift the women up; do not load them down. Nyika inovakwa nevanhu vayo vose, kwete vashoma — a nation is built by all its people, not just a favoured few.
To the women of Ward 20, Binga — who have been moved before, who will likely be moved again, and who have met that prospect not with despair but with a clear, dignified demand — this journal hears you, and carries your voice as far as it can reach.
May the boreholes be dug before you arrive. May the school be open before the old one drowns. May the graves of your grandmothers be moved with the reverence they are owed. And may your daughters inherit a settlement built for their dignity — not their endurance.
Serve us before you move us. Simudzai vakadzi veLubimbi; ivo vanotakura mvura, vana, nemhuri. Ziva kwawakabva — kunyange pakutamiswa, tichiri vanhu vane hunhu nedzinza.
Lift up the women of Lubimbi; they carry the water, the children, the household. Know where you came from — even in displacement, we remain a people of dignity and lineage.
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