Council does not need to do much

BULAWAYO City Council (BCC) has a new broom sweeping through its chambers. That ushers a new dispensation meant to sanitise the situation. The city’s economy and residents’ welfare and standard of living need to change for the better. The councillors must make sure they roll their sleeves and get down to work soonest. We have lost out for about 20 years and there is a need to accelerate development.

Companies, huge firms, have collapsed, small indigenous family companies and shops have crumbled and families have lost houses and livelihoods over the last 20 years. The councillors have the mandate and power to reverse that. People of Bulawayo have placed faith in the councillors to make Bulawayo work again.

Make Bulawayo the first place that any job seeker would consider, the first place any investor would think of, the first town any sportsperson would look to transfer to. The power is in the councillors’ palms. They do not have to sweat at all. All they need is to put their ducks in a row and bingo we are where we belong, right at the top.

There is no need for gasbags in council, no sloganeering, backbiting or trying to please some imaginary powerful residents in Harare. What’s needed are hands-on individuals with the “local” residents’ interest at heart.

Councillors who value the city’s traditions and norms, respect its culture and adore its heroes resting at Lady Stanley Memorial Park.

For a dedicated group of councillors working hand in hand with committed managers, it must not be difficult to bring back the city to its glorious past. The problem we have is that some councillors and managers do not fully identify with the city and do not feel the pain that bonafide born and bred koNtuthu residents feel.

Whether one’s parents moved to the city in its industrial heyday of the 60s to the 80s is neither here nor there. Those born and raised in the city have a particular attachment that those who settled in old age will not have as they actually feel the same for other cities. Thus it was sad that in the last council, time and effort was spent fighting a born and bred Bulawayo son, Tinashe Kambarami, who had been elected deputy mayor.

Probably those who lambasted him did not even have the love and attachment to the city that he had given his umbilical cord at United Bulawayo Hospitals.

It is not about surnames, hence we had a Zimbabwean surname, Matongo, heading Johannesburg as mayor. We have had a few more in Europe, Australia, Canada and United States. Imagine querying Josiah Chinamano, Joseph Msika, Gift Banda, Heath Streak, Benjani Mwaruwari, David Coltart, Kidwell Mujuru, Esrom Nyandoro, Marvelous Nakamba’s allegiance to Bulawayo on the basis of their names. That’s madness of course. Herbert Ushewokunze established the first black-run private surgery in Bulawayo, Marondera Clinic. We had other luminaries whose names identify shopping centres such as Chigumira and Munyoro respected for their service to the community.

Yet some of us want to pretend they don’t have relatives in diaspora competing for political office there. The most vocal, ironically, are based in South Africa and are not even ratepayers here.

The residents demand service delivery and nothing else; they do not really care who delivers. We do not need tenderpreneur councillors who are there to make hay while the sun shines on them, councillors who want to strike deals for themselves and their friends and relatives at the expense of the residents. If they delivered, nobody would complain but because it is a matter of amassing as much wealth as possible while we still can, they tend to offer shoddy services in order to reduce costs to a bare minimum, hence non-delivery of services.

For our city it must be easy. What councillors need is a plan of action. They cannot grope in the dark and expect results somehow. Major issues surround jobs creation, refuse collection, water and potholes.

Council needs to revive the vocational training centres in the townships. Many people running their own companies in the city and elsewhere were trained at our centres in the 80s and 90s. Take time to talk to your mechanic, panel beater, builder, electrician or plumber. Chances are that they will tell you they trained under the BCC vocational programmes. So why are we neglecting them?

Paying lip service during election campaigns shows that we are aware the training works. And only BCC had such a programme nationwide. In other cities, such centres are run by private technical colleges whose founders were probably graduates of the BCC vocational centres such as Tshaka in Makokoba.

Secondly, there is garbage everywhere especially in the city centre and high-density suburbs. We need to ask each other why we find it difficult to dispose of litter in bins and then timeously empty those bins. Just why is it so easy for us to throw litter anywhere without any guilt. Is your conscience clear as you carry rubbish from your house and carry it to the street corner at midnight? What are you teaching your children? When you go to Europe or Australia, probably the same with America, the first thing you notice is cleanliness on the streets.

Of course there are parts of their cities where vagabonds stay on the streets and there is litter but even there, it is so much cleaner than our own inner cities. They teach children to clean their environment and they grow up responsible. We need to teach our children from a young age to throw litter in trash cans. Everyone must just place rubbish in bins, why is that difficult? For its part, the BCC must collect rubbish on a daily basis and keep bins empty. That is not difficult to do at all given the fuel that we waste gallivanting in town visiting pubs and lodges or doing private business on council time. If garbage is collected on time nobody will feel the need to dump it by the roadside. Where I live, BCC garbage trucks religiously collect garbage on Fridays and nobody dumps it by the roadside because we know when it will be disposed of. That must apply to all areas and we will not have problems of garbage dumps where mosquitoes, cholera and dysentery breed.

Particular attention must be on the city market areas as well as inner city sanitary lanes. Shops must stop dumping expired foodstuffs in sanitary lanes or is it BCC that is taking too long to collect the daily garbage? A solution must be worked out but there is no way we can accept garbage dumps on our sanitary lanes.

Schools must teach children to always use bins and never throw litter to the ground in town. Then those children will grow up to be responsible adults who will teach their own children never to throw litter on the ground but to use bins all the time. Litter bugs must be arrested and BCC must carry out only a one month sustained campaign arresting them and everyone will learn their lesson. Just one month and word will spread, use the bin.

On its part BCC must empty the bins and never allow them to spill or worse, overspill!

Water is life. BCC has to provide the water that residents need. It must be clean water at all times. Every household must receive water at all times, not this irresponsible distribution of the commodity that forces residents to hoard it. In fact by storing water in tanks and buckets we are utilising more than we actually need in that whereas one might need 50 litres a day, they end up storing 2 000 litres a week which they periodically get rid of in order to have “fresh” water. We do not want to be like Harare, Gweru or Kadoma where some residents have gone for over 10 years without tap water. But we also do not want dirty water.

Coupled with water delivery is sewage disposal. It must be efficient and meet all environmentally safe standards. At the moment we have suburbs where effluent flows everywhere and children find it normal to sail their paper boats in the sewage water. Given the deadly cholera and typhoid episodes in the recent past, one expects councillors to ensure that that does not happen again. The immediate past council did not seem to care at all as they all lived away from the affected suburbs. In fact that habit of moving away from your original suburbs once you are elected must be discouraged. If a councillor is to be given a stand as is tradition, they must get it in their constituency. That way you fully represent yourself and others. Why do you want to translocate to another councillor’s area? Stay put where you were voted in.

Potholes are everywhere in the inner suburbs. Major roads have been done but why is it so difficult to tackle the roads once and for all? We need to be committed. Let us not sit back and sigh that it is a huge task.

Americans say if you never get started you’ll never finish. Let us hit the ground running. Instead of looking at how much work needs to be done, we must start working on our roads suburb by suburb, road by road. Instead of striking deals, we offered ourselves to the people that we are there to serve so let us do just that. There is nothing insurmountable that our constituents are not willing to assist us in tackling. Councillors must work with their constituents to set targets and work together to achieve them.

The next five years must define each of them and the greedy self serving councillors must be exposed and recalled as soon as possible, instead of waiting for five years. The last council showed us how a council must not operate with eGodini, potholes, water, cholera, garbage, excessive rates, clinics, parking, revenue hall queues, all needing attention but residents pleas were ignored.