Editorial Comment: Power cuts at waterworks show need for reform

In its official statement, ZESA confirmed that the loss of power generation at Kariba and Hwange Power Stations had plunged the country into darkness, but reassured the nation that restoration efforts were underway.

The administrative and financial disaster in Harare was highlighted last week when Zesa cut power to the Morton Jaffray Water Works for two days over an unpaid electricity bill exceeding $1 billion.

Immediate disaster was averted when Harare City Council made a $50 million payment to Zesa and promised to do the same every month until the accumulated debt was paid.

But both Zesa and the city council are at fault for putting lives of up to three million people at risk, Zesa for choosing such an extreme unilateral action and the city council for first accumulating the debt and then not negotiating a serious payment plan a lot earlier.

Brinkmanship on both sides was grossly irresponsible, Harare City Council gambling that Zesa would never go to extremes and Zesa showing that it would.

Zesa, which is owed money, a lot of money, obviously needs to be paid and cannot expect its many other customers to subsidise water users in Harare Metropolitan.

But rather than go to these extremes it should have first involved the central Government, either Energy Ministry to Local Government Ministry or through the provincial co-ordinator, who is acquiring a great deal of experience in trying to sort out lack of action by the metropolitan local authorities when the hidden effects of their lack of action rise to the surface.

If the worst had come to the worst then a legal action in the High Court, with a garnishee order granted so that the city council’s bankers had to pay Zesa something each month, would have at least kept the dispute out of the public health arena.

Zimra managed to get action on the city council declining to forward VAT and PAYE sums it collected through garnisheeing after all.

Council officials mention quietly that Zesa has not been paying since 1996 the royalties it is supposed to pay as part of the arrangements for taking over the council’s electricity department and network and its power station in the early 1980s.

These were probably negotiated to compensate the council for the loss of profit it used to make on its electricity undertaking in the days when it first ran its own power station and then when it bought bulk power from Capco at a maximum demand rate.

Through some extraordinarily efficient management, and the council had some good managers when these were working for the city rather than in dubious land dealings for private profit, it obtained a higher than budgeted load factor when it sold the energy as units and so made a profit.

But by now what Zesa owes council is probably only a modest percentage of what council owes Zesa so the council is still a major net debtor.

At the base of the council’s problems is the fact that council is not collecting its revenue from ratepayers and water buyers. Added to that its water works are operating at far below capacity so its water revenue is sharply cut, while water overheads remain high so the effective margin meant to pay for chemicals, electricity and spare parts, like water pipes, is too low.

The council has not been taking action, legal action if necessary, to get people to pay what they owe. The councillors, extremely unpopular already after the exposes of land corruption in the city and lack of other services, seem unwilling to make themselves even more unpopular. And as they were elected on an opposition party ticket, rather than because of any personal qualities, which past opposition mayors have described as unacceptably low, this is understandable, but unacceptable.

We have across the city area this huge sea of unpaid bills with everyone owing money and no one, including the council, paying.

With inflation now slashed this is not sustainable, since unpaid bills will not now vanish, and a whole new attitude is now required, starting off with an accounting system that tells everyone what they owe and a standard payment plan in place as an option.

Under the Local Government Act there are serious limits as to what the central Government can do. Municipalities, which include city councils, have a great deal of autonomy and are supposed to run their own financial affairs.

The old resort of a commission is no longer available while at least some elected councillors are out of jail, and even then a commissioner is only in office to keep things running rather than generate required reforms for a non-renewable maximum of three months while by-elections are organised.

The central Government stepped in, with council cooperation, to avert the total collapse of Morton Jaffray, with council then agreeing to keep it running. Government stepped in when the inadequate water supply and broken sewers combined to create a cholera epidemic, and so got the city through a major public health emergency with a minimal death toll.

The central Government stepped in yet again, first declaring urban roads a national emergency to give it the legal authority to override municipal independence, to start repairing and even remaking major urban roads, work that is now in progress with many of the most critical stretches fixed and work being done on others.

But the time has come for the residents of Harare, and some other local authorities in the metropolitan province, to take action themselves starting off with paying their bills. Then, in our opinion, they must take advantage of the forthcoming by-elections, as soon as the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and health authorities can work out how to do these safely in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, to nominate and elect a city council composed of people who can run a major city rather than a run-down slum limping from crisis to crisis.

Considering how much city residents spend on building or upgrading their own properties, and even how much so many are prepared to pay thieving councillors and officials or their land baron minions for dubious stands on wetlands, all it takes is some competent, responsible and honest leadership in Town House to arrest the city decline and start the rebuilding.

Central Government with the advent of the Second Republic has been managing this nationally by bringing in honest and competent technocrats and then getting them to fix the inherited mess, to the extent that the economy was stabilised, then has recovered and is now growing with basic services first restored and now being upgraded.

So it is quite possible at the local level if we put the right people into Town House and then make them accountable.