Geo Pomona Is Not A Scandal, It Is A Blessing: A Rebuttal To Lance Guma’s Distorted Tale

By Dr Masimba Mavaza

There comes a moment when journalism ceases to inform and begins to inflame. When a pen, instead of illuminating truth, is dipped in bile to tarnish that which is working.

Such is the article by Lance Guma on Geo Pomona - a piece so disrespectful, so economical with truth and so generous with innuendo, that it exposes not a scandal at Pomona, but an astounding ignorance of what is happening at Pomona.

Let us restore the truth, with gruesome honesty.

Harare Before Geo Pomona: A City On The Verge Of A Plague 

Those who have selective amnesia must be reminded. Before Geo Pomona, Harare was not a city. It was a sprawling health hazard. A capital choking on its own filth.

Pomona dumpsite was not a dumpsite. It was a smouldering, stinking factory of disease. A monstrous, smoking mountain of rotting waste, burning day and night, 365 days a year.

The smoke blanketed Borrowdale, Vainona, Mt Pleasant, Hatcliffe - a toxic veil of dioxins and methane. The leachate - that black, poisonous juice of decomposing garbage - oozed into our water table, into the very rivers that feed Lake Chivero.

Harare was topping the world charts for all the wrong reasons - cholera, typhoid, dysentery. Water-borne diseases became our shameful identity. Doctors will tell you, the stench of Pomona was the stench of death. Children in Budiriro died of cholera while Guma typed from the comfort of the diaspora.

The City of Harare had failed. Completely. It had no fleet, no capacity, no plan. Refuse went uncollected for months. Illegal dumps sprouted in every high-density suburb. The city fathers were collecting rates but could not collect garbage.

That was the scandal. Not Geo Pomona. The scandal was that we allowed our capital to become a medieval plague city in the 21st Century.

The Transformation: From Stench To Sanitation

Enter Geo Pomona.

What Guma calls a "scandal" is what every honest resident of Harare calls a miracle.

Today, drive past Pomona. The fires are gone. The stench is gone. The flies are gone. In its place is a state-of-the-art Waste Management and Waste-to-Energy Plant. A pristine, engineered landfill, a sorting plant, a green energy project that will soon power thousands of homes, manicured gardens, and a vision of a fresh, healthy Zimbabwe.

Geo Pomona did what the City of Harare could not do in 30 years. It turned a zone of death into a zone of life. It has brought investment worth hundreds of millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs for Zimbabweans, and given Harare a waste management system to rival any in Africa.

To call this a surrender is antidisestablishmentarianism at its worst - a pathological desire to oppose everything that works, simply because it works under the Second Republic.

The Lies Of The US$40 Narrative

Guma, with arithmetic meant to whip emotions, tells Zimbabweans that Harare must pay US$40 per tonne, US$40,000 a day, US$14.6 million a year. He says Harare could buy its own fleet.

Could have. Should have. But did not.

For decades, Harare was given money for trucks. Where are the trucks? They became scrap. Where is the workforce? They went unpaid. The truth is, refuse collection is a basic service, yes - but a basic service that Harare had spectacularly failed to provide. Privatization with strict performance standards is not surrender; it is sanity. It is what modern cities do.

The US$40 per tonne is not a payment for dumping. It is a payment for waste collection, transportation, engineered landfilling, environmental rehabilitation, leachate treatment, gas management and future electricity generation. It is a full value-chain fee. To reduce it to "paying to use our own dumpsite" is to deliberately fool the people.

And the claim that the company is guaranteed payment even when tonnage is not delivered? That is how Waste-to-Energy concessions work globally - to guarantee the viability of the power plant investment. Guma knows this, but chooses to mislead.

The Vicious Atrack On Cde Delish Nguwaya

The most disgraceful part of Guma's article is the cowardly, persistent attack on Cde Delish Nguwaya, a hardworking Zimbabwean entrepreneur who has put his capital and energy into solving a national crisis.

Guma drags up the Drax history, a matter that was brought before the courts of Zimbabwe and dismissed. He parades photographs as if a photograph is a crime.

If being photographed with the President is a scandal, then half of Zimbabwe is scandalous. The President is photographed with vendors, with school children, with investors. That is his job.

The attempt to link Cde Nguwaya to the First Family as "real beneficiaries" without a shred of evidence, without a single bank statement, without a single company registry, is not journalism. It is gossip masquerading as investigation. It is an attempt to incite rebellion against a legitimate national project.

His Excellency President Dr. E.D Mnangagwa appointed Cde Nguwaya as Special Advisor on Waste Management and Environmental Sustainability precisely because he has delivered where others only talked. That is not cronyism. That is merit.

Bulawayo And The Falsehood Of Haste

Guma now claims government wants to "export corruption" to Bulawayo. The truth is the opposite. Government wants to export CLEANLINESS to Bulawayo. Bulawayo's Ngozi Mine dumpsite is today what Pomona was yesterday - burning, smoking, collapsing. Are we to wait until Bulawayo has its own cholera outbreak before we act?

Consultation is important, but an environmental crisis cannot be held hostage by endless consultations while our people choke.

Cconclusion: A Blessing Maligned

Lance Guma is trying to fool the people into rebellion against their own good health. He is weaponizing the language of accountability to sabotage development.

Geo Pomona is not a scandal. It is a blessing. It is the burial of the old, filthy, cholera-ridden Harare and the birth of a fresh, green, healthy capital city.

Those who cannot smell the freshness in the air at Pomona today are those who are determined not to breathe.

Let history record: When Harare was drowning in garbage, Geo Pomona built a solution.

And let it also record that when that solution was built, there were those whose only contribution was to write lies about it from afar.