Source: Kariba’s dark Tuesday: Inside the final, agonising minutes of the Mbuya Nehanda DDF boat tragedy – herald
Emmanuel Kafe
CheckPoint Desk
ON the wide, shimmering expanse of Lake Kariba, silence usually reigns with an almost sacred stillness.
But on Tuesday afternoon, that vast mirror of water became the stage for a nightmare written in screams, roaring waves and the desperate prayers of 153 souls bound for Mola.
Inside the belly of the Rural Infrastructure Development Agency (RIDA) passenger ferry, the Mbuya Nehanda, panic was not a sudden explosion.
It was a creeping, agonising certainty that crept up column by column, wave by wave, while the vessel fought a losing battle against the elements and human stubborness.
Picture the scene in those final, terrible minutes: the engine choking on one tired cylinder, the relentless slap of dark water spilling over the gunwales and the frantic cries of mothers clutching infants to their chests.
Outside, the lake—notorious for its sudden winter fury—was swelling under a shifting south-westerly wind.
Inside, the air was thick with heat, argument and terror.
“We told him,” one survivor recalled, his voice still trembling with the echo of the ordeal.
“We told him before we even left the harbour that the wave was too strong. But he said he was the captain and needed no advice from anyone.”
What transpired in the heart of Lake Kariba was a tragedy born in the friction between warning and denial, played out on an inland sea that forgives no mistakes.
A fateful departure
The journey had begun not with panic, but with an ill-fated sense of reassurance.
Before the Mbuya Nehanda untied its moorings, the captain gathered the 153 passengers—men, women, infants and crew—to offer a prayer.
He assured the gathered crowd that since the day the ferry was manufactured, it had never once capsized. There was no need to worry, he told them.
Yet, even as those solemn words echoed across the deck, the lake offered its first grim omen.
A sudden, violent gust hit the vessel while still at the harbour, knocking a heavy bag of luggage clean off the deck and into the churning water.
Passengers exchanged worried glances.
Quarrels broke out between worried commuters and the crew. But the captain dismissed the fallen bag, brushed off the rising anxiety, and pushed the throttles forward.
By mid-morning, the weather over Kariba was mounting its quiet assault.
Meteorological data from the day tells a story of a shifting, gathering force.
At 8am, the wind was a gentle breeze from the west at 14 km/h.
But as the sun climbed higher, the wind swung around to the south-west, gathering speed. By 11am, gusts had reached 25 km/h, warming the air to 29°C. By 2pm, sustained gusts were pushing 29 km/h—roughly 16 knots.
To a casual observer on the shore, 29km/h might not sound like a tempest.
But experienced mariners know the peculiar lethality of Lake Kariba in August.
This is the season of the fearsome “Binga Wave”—a phenomenon born when sustained south-westerly winds blow uninterrupted across the long, open stretches of the lake’s vast fetch, stacking up steep, relentless walls of water that slam into vessels with unforgiving weight.
The Mbuya Nehanda was steaming straight into the teeth of it.
Water was getting insoide
Thirty minutes into the voyage, the ferry was struggling.
The vessel was already operating under severe mechanical strain, relying on only a single functioning engine. As the south-westerly wind built up organised, rolling swells, the lake began to claim the boat inch by inch.
Heavy waves crashed over the sides. Water began pooling on the floorboards, sloshing against luggage and soaking the feet of terrified passengers.
“The boat started tipping on one side and water was getting inside,” recounted another survivor. “For the third time, he didn’t take our advice.”
Tatenda Sianjeme, a passenger from Mola who survived the ordeal, recalled the overwhelming helplessness as the waves grew larger than anything the vessel could handle.
“The wave was too much,” Sianjeme said. “We pleaded with the captain to go to a nearby island to take shelter, but he refused.”
Inside the vessel’s hull, technical failure quickly compounded human error.
Anymore Chambati, a RIDA security officer and one of the five crew members aboard tasked with issuing tickets, watched the disaster unfold from the inside.
“After a few kilometres, the boat started to malfunction and water was getting into the engine,” Chambati said.
The vessel possessed a mechanical bilge pump designed to remove incoming water, but the rising flood acted too fast.
“We couldn’t manage to remove the water because the machine used to do that was already submerged in water,” Chambati explained.
Desperate passengers realised the boat was settling deeper into the water. When the captain finally acknowledged that the vessel was listing dangerously, his instruction offered no relief: he ordered everyone to crowd onto one side of the boat to balance the weight.
It was a fatal miscalculation. The sudden shift of human weight, combined with free-surface water sloshing in the bilge, only accelerated the tipping motion. The ferry began to sink faster.
The last stand on open water
Realising that authority had failed them, the passengers took matters into their own hands.
A brave woman on board pulled out her mobile phone, dialing Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks) officers to plead for an immediate rescue.
When the captain realised a distress call was being made, anger flared in the midst of catastrophe.
He stormed out, shouting at the passengers, demanding to know why they had called for help and insisting that the situation was entirely under his control.
“He told us no one should call anyone,” a survivor remembered. “He was moving up and down shouting.”
Then came the definitive moment of disaster.
As the ferry wallowed in the trough of the waves, the remaining engine cut out.
Whether it drowned in the rising bilge water or was deliberately switched off by the captain remains a point of agonized debate among those who were there.
Mr Friday Munenga, from Dobe village in Mola, recalled the terrifying moment the vessel lost power.
“The situation became worse the moment the captain switched off the remaining engine that was still functioning,” Munenga said. “We don’t even know how we survived.”
With no forward momentum to steer into the oncoming swells, the Mbuya Nehanda was at the absolute mercy of the Binga waves.
The vessel turned broadside to the chop. Panic erupted. Passengers rushed back and forth, frantically searching for life jackets—only to discover none were available.
“There were no life jackets at all,” survivors confirmed. “Everyone was just confused, rushing and looking for life jackets as it continued to capsize.”
Within seconds, the lake claimed the boat. The Mbuya Nehanda rolled over into the dark water, throwing 153 men, women, and tiny children into the cold, wave-swept expanse of Lake Kariba.
Clinging to life
What followed was an agonising struggle for survival that lasted hours.
“Water was getting into my mouth,” one survivor recalled, describing the horror of being swallowed by the lake as the boat went under.
In the chaos, human instinct and pure grace took over.
With no life jackets to keep them afloat, victims grabbed onto whatever floated.
Bags of luggage that had spilled from the deck became makeshift lifesavers.
Others swam back toward the overturned hull of the ferry, hauling themselves onto the exposed bottom of the capsized vessel.
“It is by the grace of God that we survived,” one passenger whispered. “We survived by leaning on some of the luggage that was floating on the water.”
Security officer Chambati and a handful of others managed to climb atop the overturned hull.
From that precarious roost in the middle of the lake, they scanned the vast, empty water, watching helpless heads bobbing in the waves.
Of the five crew members on board, only Chambati and one other would live to tell the story.
Hours ticked by under the glaring afternoon sun. Around mid-afternoon, the beat of rotor blades cut through the sound of the wind—a helicopter passed overhead.
“I raised my hands,” a survivor remembered, waving frantically from the water in a desperate plea to be seen.
Rescue finally materialised around 2pm when a boat from Tashinga, alongside Zimparks reaction teams and local operators, reached the scene.
They pulled shivering, traumatised survivors from the water and off the slippery hull of the sunken ferry.
A nation mourns
By the time the search and recovery operations were officially called off as of yesterday (to continue today) the full weight of the tragedy had settled over the nation like a heavy shroud.
Sub-aqua divers, working tirelessly in the murky depths of the lake, recovered 25 bodies in their final operation alone—14 adults and 11 innocent children who had set out that morning expecting a routine trip home to Mola.
The final death toll stands at a staggering 44 lives lost.
President Mnangagwa, has officially declared the Lake Kariba ferry disaster a State of Disaster, directing government agencies to mobilise all necessary resources to assist the bereaved families, handle burial arrangements, and support the survivors who carry physical and mental scars that may never heal.
In villages across Mola, in Dobe, and throughout the Kariba district, fires burn outside homesteads where families mourn entire generations lost in a single afternoon.
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