admin
THE attitude Harare City Council takes to garbage no longer ceases to amaze: everyone knows it is close to totally hopeless, unable to plan and quite willing to let Zimbabwe’s largest city just sit in the mess.
This is despite having close to 130 years of dealing with this vital service.
Right back when the tiny town was founded around Fort Salisbury, it was recognised that sanitary issues, which include garbage, had to be sorted out properly if the entire population was not going to be lined up in rows of graves.
So the British South Africa Company set up a Sanitary Board to do just three things: make sure sewage was in latrines or was collected in that primitive bucket system, make sure wells were not contaminated by sewage or garbage, and make sure the garbage was properly disposed of.
The roads could be widened footpaths, the town administration could sit in huts, equipment could be shovels and handcarts. But the village, as it was basically then, had to be kept clean.
Just after the First Chimurenga, the board was upgraded to a municipality, largely at the beginning to sort out the drains and stop shopkeepers sweeping their rubbish into these drains.
Starting to smooth the roads came fairly promptly; none of this fancy surfacing, just making sure potholes were filled, storm water was prevented from flooding the area, and that people could walk, cycle and drive their wagons without injury.
That primitive municipality did not do that bad a job, the standard being no long lines of graves from an epidemic.
There was a gap early last century when the shopkeeper most notorious for dumping garbage in the street and refusing to pay rates ran for council, and startling everyone by getting in, then became mayor, spent all the money on a town house and a mayoral chain, totally neglected services, overdrew the overdraft and fled a couple of months before the next election.
Anyone who sees any similarity between the present council and that of Dudley Bates has good reason. Besides bankrupting the town, his administration also let storm water destroy the roads and was far from adequate over garbage and filth.
It took two years for a group of competent and honest business people to fix the mess when he was gone, largely by hiring a small staff of people who knew what to do and then backing them fully, making sure the rates were collected so they could pay for the essential work.
We now seem right back at that point.
The central Government did move in and took over the road maintenance, so at least two decades of neglect since the MDC-CCC councils took over is being fixed.
Sewers are suspect to put it mildly and we pump almost raw sewage into our water supply dams, and our garbage is uncollected and is being dumped at the nearest inconvenient spot and allowed to spontaneously combust.
Then the council had a good idea: why not fix the garbage problem. Careful professional studies produced a Dutch company that could at least get rid of the rubbish, so long as the council could collect it.
The council did its sums and thought this was a good idea. It wanted a contract. The company, perhaps knowing the council better than councillors expected, wanted a Government guarantee and in any case this sort of investment needs Government approval.
Negotiations were finalised and the council cheered and claimed the credit. Then, a month or two into the contract, it said it had no money, basically because its accounts system is so hopeless it cannot even tell residents what they owe, let alone collect it. It has the money, but just on paper not in the bank. The problem is not financial: it is purely administrative.
Councillors are keener on perks and public relations rather than running a city.
The main benefit of the Pomona Dump contract appears to be to give a group of CCC councillors a huge consultation fee to do their job. Is a seat in the chamber reserved for the ghost of Mayor Bates?
The council’s reaction has been to try and repudiate the garbage contract, thus throwing the burden on central Government in terms of the guarantee.
In other words, like the roads and the collapse of town planning in new suburbs, it wants Government to clean up the mess it itself has created by refusing to do its job.
When you come down to it, roads, town planning and garbage are central services that local government is supposed to do, especially in Zimbabwe’s biggest and richest city.
In the other two central services, water and sewerage, the council fails its passing grade, although the Second Republic’s Central Government is pushing ahead with a new dam, waterworks and pipeline, yet another municipal function handed over because of incompetence.
Minister of Local Government and Public Works July Moyo, like the rest of us, is startled at the council’s actions of expecting someone else to pay its bills, almost simultaneously with the start of work at the dump.
Was Pomona just going to be a PR exercise? Did the council expect the Dutch company to copy the council and talk rather than act? Was it just a plan to get something for nothing?
He has acted moderately, telling the council that legally you cannot just tear up contracts, especially with serious investors, and that they need to rescind their illegal resolutions promptly. But now we need to clean up the mess.
We have probably reached a point where a lot of residents would like central Government to take over garbage, as it has with roads.
In any case, it has effectively taken over town planning as it surveys the “land baron” estates and works out title deeds.
It is also stopping the barons continuing with their nefarious activities. Government has also started to deal with water supply with the emergency boreholes and the contracts to build Kunzvi Dam and the works to get that water to Harare. It is making payments regularly on that contract we note.
But that just leaves the city council as a bunch of people wearing yellow shirts and laughing and joking as they collect allowances, work out new perks, pass the buck and do precisely nothing except continue converting their administration into something that makes the Pomona dumpsite at its worst look like the Garden of Eden.
While Mayor Bates provides the preview of our present mess, his era also provides the solution.
Residents took a deep breath, threw the rascals out and elected a brand-new council dominated by serious business people and professionals prepared to work for Harare rather than themselves and who, one step at a time, efficiently cleaned up the mess and the filth and put their little town on the road to becoming a great city.
A city the size of Harare today can surely find 46 competent councillors, with the integrity needed and track record in other walks of life, to do exactly the same in our era.
Online Reporter