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Harare City Council has a poor reputation for having a businesslike approach to many of its functions and as has now been revealed, to some of its pure business functions. That 400 tenants of commercial premises owned by the council have in effect not been paying rent for six years, since their leases are denominated in Zimbabwe dollars, will not surprise most residents, only sadden them that once again something that should have been done was not done, to the detriment of the people who live in the city.
We do not know how the missing rents were discovered, but we suspect it was by accident. In a normal business, regular audits would find these sort of mistakes and in any case even a brief look over the accounts from the council’s rent roll would surely have revealed that there were gaps, or even that the total rents earned were on the low side.
What is even more worrying is that there could be more than just incompetence. There have been suggestions that much of the missing rents are for premises leased to past and present officials or their families and that as a result quite a few people decided not to look.
Now that the mistake has been discovered, it will no doubt be rectified quickly, but there will still be all those years of lost rents. While the leases are being sorted out, we think there should also be an internal investigation to find out why they were not sorted out in 2009.
All private property owners converted their leases from Zimbabwe dollar rent to US dollar rent, the second it was legal to do so, and several broke the law and did it earlier.
We also think that there needs to be debate on just how Harare City Council has so much property to rent out.
Some seems obvious: shops in parking garages for example. But other properties are probably inherited from some outdated scheme of decades long ago. A debate within the council on what properties should now be sold off, and what could be retained, is needed. There might be good arguments to having income from assets rather than from residents; there might be equally good arguments that city debt could be reduced if assets were sold off.
Some of the debate would thus have to focus on how, if commercial assets are to be retained, Harare City Council can maximise its income. Perhaps hiring private property management companies to administer blocks of these properties could be a good solution.
Their commissions might well be a small fraction of the extra income they bring to the city coffers and they could evict delinquent tenants and do all the other activities that politicians sometimes fear to do. Pure business decisions are needed for pure business activities and a city council, elected and run in theory for the public good might not be the best expert to administer assets that are there purely to make money, rather than provide a service.
The council has started to make decisions that should have been made years ago. Water supplies are better, although far from 1990s standards and are still subject to illogical and unexplained cuts. A rational vendors policy is now in place, with council land and shelters rented out for nominal fees, thus providing a public benefit, but without turning the city pavements into a flea market. Even garbage collection, a long bugbear, is almost regular.
But roads are growing worse, traffic lights frequently miss bulbs, revenue collection is slow, planning decisions are taken without proper consultations and every now and then, as with the leases, something very peculiar surfaces. More effort is obviously needed to work out longer-term practical plans to upgrade the city and to find all the past anomalies that stunt the city and fix them, promptly.
Online Reporter