Harare City Council owed over US$70 million

THE city of Harare is owed more than  US$70 million by various stakeholders with residents being the biggest debtors, an official has said.

Council chairman of the finance committee Costa Mande said this on Tuesday during a press conference.

He said they have since engaged debtors to collect the outstanding money.

“The debt is around US$70 million and of this, the major chunk is the residents, then there are others like industry, Government and the dormitory towns, but those we have managed to deal with them heavily and their bill is now low, but mainly the residents are the major debtors so far,” he said.

Mande said as council apart from enlisting the services of debt collectors, they have also engaged more staff to help in recovering of the outstanding amounts, as well as encouraging residents to own up and pay their bills.

Turning to the contentious issue of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) billing system that was condemned by Government before ordering the local authority to revert to the previous ERP system, Mande said they have since complied with the directive.

“On the ERP system, the Ministry had said we have not complied with the Auditor General’s recommendation to re-engage the previous ERP system
and therefore we did likewise. On April 30th we had a special council meeting here where we resolved to re-engage the previous ERP system which is Quill Associates, the implementers of BIQ,” he said.

He said BIQ is currently at the premises installing the system and already they had managed to install all the infrastructure which includes 10 core modules and only left with the take on balances.

He said as a city they also have some challenges as they are faced with the need to upgrade their systems, equipment, adding in the third quarter they will be procuring new up to date computers and savers in an effort to upscale the operations of the new system.

Mande said various training programs to do with the new system have been lined up while data cleaning was in progress so that when they start using the new ERP everything will be perfect.

New Ziana