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Innocent Ruwende : Municipal Reporter
More than 80 000 Harare properties are not on the city’s database, and the owners are not paying rates, prejudicing council of millions of dollars in potential revenue. In an interview on the sidelines of a workshop to craft a Geographical Information System strategy for Harare City Council, the city’s land management and development manager Mr Booker Masasi said the GIS would help council plug loopholes.“When we began the project in May 2015, the rates database had about 177 000 properties, but as we speak now, the rates data base now has 261 000 properties.
“In other words almost 80 000 are not contributing to revenue, and we are saying we need to plug all those loopholes by making sure that everyone that has to pay for a service pays for the service and that is where the financial sustainability of the city will come from,” he said.
Some property owners have not been seeking certificates of occupation after completion of the construction of their buildings from the city, a process that would result in them being registered on the rates database, and subsequently on the billing system.
Instead, they prefer to use private water meter installers.
The non-registration has resulted in the 80 000 properties accessing water and other services for free.
The city’s department of housing is responsible for ensuring that newly-constructed properties are registered and entered on to the rates database.
Mr Masasi said the GIS helps in cost containment, giving an example of leaking purified water.
He said the city could produce 60 percent of the water it was currently producing and provide the same amount of water since 40 percent was being lost through leakages.
“If the water was not leaking, then we will only need to treat 60 percent of the water.
“We could be pumping at 60 percent that is reaching the residents now,” he said.
The City of Harare embarked on the GIS programme in 2014 with the help of its sister cities of Munich (Germany), eThekwini (South Africa) and City of Bulawayo under the Zimbabwe Germany and South Africa project (ZIGESA).
Acting town clerk Mrs Josephine Ncube said GIS is a state-of-the-art innovation which will aid the city’s vision to become a world class city by the year 2025.
“World class status means that the citizens get world class services, and for that, a profound knowledge of the city is necessary, which means an up-to-date geographical geo-database, as roughly 90 percent of the City of Harare’s budget comes from revenue streams that have some geographical relevance.
“More than 70 percent of the tax income is connected with geographical information again, and so, we see the importance of GIS in that aspect too,” she said.
She said the city was looking forward to better planning in terms of service delivery and ensuring that for purposes of decision making, the actual number of properties in the city are captured.
Mrs Ncube said council would also be able to now illegal developments in the city using the GIS.
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