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HARARE City Council, without a proper billing system for the past five years, and often not having the faintest idea of how it is spending some of its money, has finally buckled and is recommissioning the recommended and required high-end accounting system it dumped in 2019.
But there is a bill of US$2,6 million to reinstall this system and while payments can be staggered, ratepayers will be paying for this colossal mistake.
The annual maintenance and licence fees were just US$75 000 a year, that the 2019 council thought too high, a cost over five years of US$375 000.
The council was paying US$35 000 a year, so the extra was just US$40 000 a year, US$200 000 over five years, so the re-installation comes to an extra US$2,4 million.
This is a bill ratepayers are stuck with, in addition to the money lost because no one could track it properly, plus the money spent on licencing an inadequate system designed for small and medium businesses.
That mistake means less money for garbage trucks, less money for ambulances, less money for fire engines, less money for street lights, less money for road repairs, and so it goes.
On the other hand, the restoration of the tried and tested BIQ system, designed for managing the finances of large cities and familiar to all, but the most junior staff in the municipal machine, means that for the first time in half a decade, Harare City Council might get something right.
At least it will have a far better idea of what is wrong.
It has a good chance of being able to see its own finances, and be able to bill residents and resident companies accurately, and be able, other things being equal, to run the city.
That caveat of other things being equal is still there especially as yet another four municipal officials have just been arrested on corruption-related charges, this time over a street light tender.
They join another 23 officials from the finance department alone suspended over corruption-related allegations, not to say other officials in other departments playing the odds in the darkness created by Zimbabwe’s second largest entity after the central Government itself when it dumped its enterprise resource planning system, a requirement in almost every larger company let alone something as big as Harare municipality.
There is a good chance that as the accumulated data is brought into the BIQ system, and a respectable set of auditable accounts can be run, more questionable decisions and non-decisions will become apparent.
While ratepayers of Harare cannot second guess the Commission of Inquiry set up by President Mnangagwa and chaired by Retired judge Justice Maphios Cheda, they can and we hope will be asking difficult questions of their city council and their local councillor.
In any case Justice Cheda, along with his open-ended terms of reference, was specifically asked to look into the then absence of a proper financial system, and no doubt he will be adding in the views of his commission on the reinstallation and the costs and its effective or non-effective use and the costs of it missing over the last five years.
In one sense, the US$2,6 million reinstallation fee is a bit of a bargain. A US$51 million system was proposed internally within the council last year, almost 20 times the price.
That was shot down when the figures were revealed and the public exploded.
The warning that some of the hardware running BIQ is coming up for renewal is not an extra cost.
Hardware does need periodic renewal, although we hope that first the city council gets some serious independent advice on just what needs replacement, and secondly, considering the sort of mess seen in Harare tender procedures and those in other entities, that something in a really serious tendering and costing procedure will be in place.
A second financial explosion is now likely over City Parking, a private company set up and owned by the city council to manage the parkades, car parks and city centre street parking.
Right now Parliament’s very powerful Public Accounts Committee is quizzing the company and the council over why City Parking accounts cannot be audited by the Auditor General, who by law must audit local authorities.
Trying to claim that the council entity that has a huge daily cashflow and is by all reports providing a respectable slice of council income cannot be audited because it is a private company simply does not wash.
Even trying to find out what it makes and spends and pays its staff, including its chief executive, seems to be regarded as a secret.
Fortunately, Parliament has a solution, a small amendment to the law making it clear that companies operating council services must make their accounts public and must have them checked by the Auditor-General.
Companies like City Parking and, for that matter Rufaro Marketing, now a property company since it lost its beer monopoly in the high density suburbs, simply replaced municipal departments.
It was just an internal arrangement that had the potential for higher efficiency, and admittedly they probably could not do worse, but they need to lay out the details for ratepayers to judge.
Using their secrecy arguments, a city council could just convert every department and service into a private company, and then never have any accounts to show or audit.
We await with interest the Parliamentary Committee’s draft of the legal change required, killing the arguments along with the secrecy.
These service companies are not independent.
Their money, and their assets, and their fees and rents are council money, assets and fees and they can must tell us in detail what they are making, what they are paying staff and all the rest of the sort of detail an ordinary municipal department has to lay out.
Fortunately this is another area the Justice Cheda Commission was specifically asked to investigate, and presumably with the extra powers a Presidential Commission of Inquiry has, it will be able to penetrate the walls of top secrecy and let in a lot of light. Its report looks as though it could be a best seller.
Online Reporter