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The horrendous land thefts and sales by land barons across wide areas of southern Harare and areas in an around Chitungwiza on the other side of the Manyame River were now thought to be an historical disaster, although needing considerable time and money to sort out.
But now a new criminal gang of thieves and fraudsters has gone active, this time grabbing the railway reservation for the Chitungwiza Light Railway, school site, sites for nurseries, sites of waterways, and the site of a shopping mall.
The gang calls itself the Mapani Youth Housing Co-operative Limited, which does not exist, but they hired a post off box at the Waterfalls Post Office to give themselves an address.
Residents, tired perhaps by the lack of any action in the past by the Harare City Council and Chitungwiza Municipality, and no doubt concerned over the name dropping of officials from the town and city, have this time gone to the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission, where there are guaranteed action either directly or with other relevant authorities.
And it is effective action that can be expected this time. For a start there is not just the entrance of ZACC, but much of the land that appears to be have been grabbed belongs to the Government.
Railway reserves are national land, not local authority land, and generally waterways fall under the Water Ministry.
It is easy to argue that land set aside in educational reserves belongs to the Government, via the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education who have been the recipients of these fixed percentages of every development scheme for more than a century now.
The Ministry can reassign the land if a local authority is building the public school, or if some other mechanism has been found to build a public school, but the land starts off with the Ministry.
So this time there is not much private land, if any at this stage has yet to be legally sold, and most of what the criminal gang has grabbed falls under some arm of the State.
With an early warning from the residents it should now be possible, even easy, for the required authorities, presumably including the police, to hunt down the gang, and when having found them freeze bank accounts so any money grabbed can be refunded to defrauded stand buyers.
In other words we can fix this problem early and thus avoid the heartbreak and many other problems later on.
Even if the land grabbed by the land barons finally destined for residential housing, or for housing and commercial premises, it should still be early enough to make sure that there are no transfers and that every lead of some sort of unofficial sale is followed up to block the deal.
The sort of land the gang have grabbed is not the sort of land that can be regularised for other purposes. Most of the land baron estates have a reasonable chance of some sort of regularisation because the land was zoned for housing and rough, although unsurveyed layouts, were made.
This has seen the start of a regularisation process that involves doing aerial surveys, in fact using satellite data.
These in turn used to generate the title deeds, issuing these and then getting the new land owners to leverage on their new assets to fund the missed development of roads, sewers and water connections that the barons never did.
Regularising the conversion of schools, railway lines, rivers and private shopping malls to housing is not legally possible. So there is a double urgency in dealing with this latest outbreak of land baron crime, both to stop the chains of crime and to ensure that the people who are defrauded are not left to carry the costs this time.
There may be those who feel that the railway corridor between Harare and Chitungwiza can be de-designated. Perhaps. But the ever growing transport morass in Harare Metropolitan, despite widening road reserves where possible and earmarking new reserves, will require in a decade or two some new innovative ways to sort out the problems.
And one of these ways could well be using the railways network in the province.
For a start there is the east-east line, and while this is single track the civil engineering is for a twin-track line, thanks to some far-seeing colonial engineer a few decades ago. So the track grades and the bridges are all designed and built for double track, slashing the costs.
The Chitungwiza link line emerged out of some detailed studies run by the then Local Government Ministry in the late 1980s.
The technical staff, while standing back from the visionaries operating without being conscious of costs, were in general agreement that a link running through Harare’s south-west suburbs and then swinging east into Chitungwiza was both technically possible and technically desirable.
They just wished the money was available then, but this is why the rail reservation was laid out, so future councils and even a future metropolitan province would have some of the basics they needed.
A fourth line, the existing one to Mazowe, provides a north-west spur for a future urban rail network. We only need to look at major global cities to understand that at some stage the millions of people living within Harare metropolitan are going to need a first class commuter rail service.
School sites are similar. When they are set aside they are not needed. They are set aside as part of other town planning and other work by developers.
The point is that one day they will be needed, when lots of houses of flats have been built and families move in with their children. They want somewhere where their children can go to school, within walking distance.
Even that walking distance requires very short distances, and quite a lot of small schools, for early learning development, child care and primary schools.
While secondary pupils can walk a couple of kilometres, and even longer if they have to, growing densities mean every school site will have to be developed.
We have seen the sort of problems that arise when private schools are opened and are having to buy land, and we do not need that for our public system where costs are already as much as parents can bear.
So if we need to leave a site for a few years until the flats are built let us at least designate and protect the site.
Water courses of course fall largely under the Environmental Management Authority in urban areas, and the EMA and those using the Environment Law have found that both can be used to protect wet lands, preventing future disaster or letting people live in flooded valleys, and as much of our public open space and recreational land is wetland, this has a double benefit.
It is possible to stop that land-baron mindlessness now, draw the line and ensure that while we clean up what can be cleaned up we resolve fully that we will not add to the disasters, and instead will ensure that our future, and we hope very rapid, development will all be done properly.
Online Reporter