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Chitungwiza Municipality leadership went to sleep, leaving some enterprising councillors and individuals to sell council land to unsuspecting people who built structures on 14 000 residential stands demarcated in undesignated areas.
Today the council is saddled with the burden of convincing the High Court of the need for these structures, the majority of which are already completed houses, to be demolished.
Here is a case of a local authority that failed to enforce its own by-laws, resulting in unscrupulous individuals, some of them former councillors, pegging housing stands on top of main sewer lines, wetlands and beneath dangerous infrastructure such as power pylons.
Given that the damage has already been done and that someone in council fouled up, there must be some exceptions for the structures to be demolished.
It is counterproductive for the council to persuade the courts to give them permission to destroy houses built by the people using hard earned money.
Can the council advise where it is going to accommodate the people in Seke rural and Chitungwiza town who are going to be affected by the demolitions in the event that the courts grant them the permission?
We also expect the municipality to advise the nation on how they are going to compensate the people who spent thousands of dollars building what they thought would be their permanent homes.
Assuming that each household had six people, it means over 84 000 people will be thrown into the streets with nowhere to go.
We want to believe that not all the 14 000 units were built on areas not fit for human habitation and for that reason, can council commission a proper independent investigation to establish the number of houses that could be saved from demolition.
We want transformational leaders who do forward planning, see where they want to take the institution and address potentially disastrous situations before they happen.
We do not want leaders who wait for disaster to strike and then start punishing people for performing wrong deeds yet they had the opportunity to do the proverbial stitch in time that saves nine.
Surely, if you think you are leaders and you do not have followers behind you, then you are just taking a walk.
Chitungwiza municipality must have either been left behind by the people or they are just walking in the wilderness alone without the people.
However, in as much as we might attack the council for going to sleep on duty, the residents should also take a fair share of the blame.
We want to warn the people that taking desperate and rushed decisions might be a recipe for future disasters.
The aspiring home owners must take necessary steps such as investigating the legality of the housing schemes they join and ascertain if the sellers own the land it is developing or not.
Local authorities are there to give that free advice.
The only defence one should trust is the law and no amount of political clout can protect you once you are involved in some of these illegal deals.
More so ignorance of the law is no defence at law.
Online Reporter