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FOR more than two decades, the major opposition party in Zimbabwe, which does change in name although the personnel remain the same, has believed it “owns” the urban vote and can present anyone as a city or town councillor and have them shoved into office.
Many of these, in fact most of these, are people without any community standing, that is professionals, heads of recognised businesses, or people who have moved into local government through championing important issues in their own wards. They just appear on the ballots with the party nomination and get into office.
Most appear to live on their monthly allowances, although it is noticeable that they seem to build up their personal wealth during their five years on council. The way they do that is not on record, just the results as they can afford to buy council assets.
The allowances are not meant to be a source of income, rather to cover the expenses of an active councillor, the petrol they need to buy to come to meetings and keep an eye on their ward, the extra phone bills incurred by keeping in contact with residents and officials, that sort of thing. The time they spend on council work is supposed to be freely given.
In some councils where there are first rate officials inherited from previous administrations, or at least trained within those administrations and promoted on merit, the fact that the overwhelming majority of the council might not be up to the job is not too critical in the short term.
The machine can continue to run on automatic although innovation, active response to new issues and the necessary oversight of a decent council might be lacking.
But as you move up the ladder and the local authority becomes ever larger and more complex, you need councillors who can cope with the issues, or at the very least understand what the issues are, and who have a determination that their city or town will be run properly.
Even if you have competent officials, you still need councillors who can make sure that the heads of the administration know what they are doing, and who can do their job of asking the right questions and then sifting the answers to make sure they make sense.
Eventually you reach Harare, easily the largest and most complex and probably the worst run, although Chitungwiza is in the same bracket at least at council level.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Harare faced a number of major issues.
As the capital of the newly independent country it was growing fast, and that growth had to be done right, and to be blunt in colonial times its administration was never considered to be the best in the country: that award went to Bulawayo.
But the new post-independence councils had a large and very solid core of professionals: engineers, doctors and lawyers in particular.
There was a group of solid business people who ran large companies or had built such companies. So they could read the budgets and the accounts, they could ensure that the tender proposals and the tender adjudication was done properly, they could sift applications for the top tier of officials and find the gems they needed to run the city, and then make sure they did.
So Harare doubled its water supply; Harare built a whole new sewage processing system that won international awards and effectively allowed the city to recycle half its water; it had a roads department that had teams continuously maintaining roads and resurfacing them on a regular basis; and it had a finance department with ultra-clean accounts that the auditors admired as they ticked everything off. And the rates were collected on time and properly calculated so the budget made sense.
The last couple of decades have seen a major change. The water supply is now back at the level of 1980, if not below.
The award-winning sewage plants were not fully maintained and certainly not expanded as the plans required; the roads department was allowed to collapse; the health department had to shut some clinics for financial reasons and when it should have been funded to expand the network; town planning became a joke.
And the last five years have seen most of the department heads and many senior staff out on bail pending trials for corruption, with the first two now in jail.
The accounts have been severely criticised by auditors because the city is using a system designed for medium-sized businesses, at a higher cost than the efficient system it rejected.
The mayors who came into office in 2008 and 2013 were both reasonably competent, although the 2008 mayor had to come from outside the council, and both complained bitterly at the sort of talent or lack of talent they had on the council.
There was a severe shortage of people who could oversee an administration, select the right staff in interviews, be innovative in their vision of the city, or even just understand what was going on. That has become even worse in the last five years and its multiplicity of mayors, with two of them charged in court.
This also shows the weakness of the opposition parties and the problems they have in attracting talent. In any normal society with the voting patterns in Zimbabwe from the early 2000s, one would have expected a reasonable opposition party to show it was a valid alternative to the Government by doing a superb job in the local councils it controlled.
But the only person who can say if you elect the CCC then Zimbabwe will be run like Harare is President Mnangagwa, and while he is running on his own first-rate national record, he has that second arrow of also bringing up the shameful record of the CCC councils in urban areas and running on that as well. The contrast in records is dramatic.
The central Government under the Second Republic has found ways to intervene dramatically in municipal affairs, not to run them since by law it cannot, but to cope with the disasters they have created or allowed to happen as they do zero for their residents.
In his Harare rally, the President was prepared to list that emergency work: the roads programme, the drilling of 86 boreholes so far as urban areas were added to the rural borehole programme, and these being fitted with solar-powered pumps in contrast to the hand pumps of the small handful of municipal boreholes drilled more than a decade ago.
Now garbage has been declared a disaster and so emergency work can be done.
Health has seen central government intervention. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Government effectively took over the running of the two large Harare infectious diseases hospitals and their staff, so at least they could both have the urgent remedial work needed and the staff paid.
The huge swathe of new suburbs in southern Harare had no municipal clinic, so the Government built the first of the new large clinics, a lot bigger than the standard local authority ones but a bit smaller than a hospital. The chain of those is already being expanded with the second in Bulawayo now open.
The President obviously suggested that on their own records, the CCC councils should be replaced. But even the most fervent opposition supporters should at least look at the candidates on offer in their wards, cross off the ones who obviously are useless and then select someone who can do the job.
The President is correct that Zanu PF, with its selection procedure involving vetting aspirants and then making those judged to be qualified win a primary, is presenting candidates who are qualified to be councillors and who have proven support within their communities, so there is someone available who is a lot better than what is on offer from the present city council gang.
Online Reporter