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Sallomy Matare Municipal Reporter
As the year draws to a close, Harare City Council has fallen short in areas such as garbage collection, provision of adequate water, sewer reticulation, road rehabilitation and failure to provide other essential services. The city has also failed to pay salaries for its workers on time, which has also compromised service delivery.
The city however, has attributed the poor state of affairs to the poor performance of its budget.
Chairperson of council’s finance and development committee, Councillor Luckson Mukunguma, who presented city’s $4,6 billion budget for next year, attributed the poor performance to the economic environment that the local authority operated in during the year under review, which he said was unfavourable.
“Ratepayers did not prioritise paying municipal bills hence the low collection efficiency,” said Clr Mukunguma said.
Harare expected to get the bulk of its money from rates ($104,9 million), water ($100,8 million), operations ($55,22 million) and refuse collection ($27,08 million)
In the 2020 budget, council hopes that the adoption of cost recovery budget will enhance council operations and improve service delivery.
“This budget is meant to give our people new hope and to transform Harare into a smart City,” he said.
Council had an initial $472,2 million budget which was meant to transform and improve lives of the residents of Harare as opposed to being mere tools for recording and controlling expenditure patterns .
The budget was eroded by inflation.
A supplementary budget of $829, 8 million was implemented in October. The city collected $203 million against the targeted $472,2 million as at September 30, this year.
“2019, council had a non-performing budget for the first ten months due to several reasons. Council was charging the same tariffs of water, rates, refuse and other service charges that it was charging in 2018 when the economy was in a multi-currency regime.”
Cllr Mukunguma said the collapse of Enterprise Resource Platform ERP also negatively impacted revenue collection.
“The city’s situation was worsened by the non-availability of the ERP from March this year as this had a huge knock on effect on revenue collection, which drastically went down as collection could not be enforced.
“Data on income and expenditure had to be manually computed.”
Council has since migrated to a new billing system. Little progress has also been made on water and sanitation.
Partnerships were made in water and sanitation, with the $7 million Harare Wastewater project (Ruzivo Stream Crossing) being expensed.
However, the city remains dangerously vulnerable to water borne diseases.
Council made a few accomplishments which include road rehabilitation in the CBD and design and construction of the High Glen/Glen Eagles traffic circles.
While there has been a general appreciation of the challenges in the economy council could have done better had the available resources been put to good use.
The conduct of city fathers and management has brought their sincerity to providing quality service to ratepayers into question.
One of these is their penchant for spending large sums of money on out of town workshops and trips.
A case in point is the decision by the Mayor and Town Clerk to spent US$20 000 on a trip to the United States in September when the city had announced that it was shutting down Morton Jaffray Water Works because council had run out of water treatment chemicals and was failing to access foreign currency to import the chemicals.
Residents have also been irked by lack of checks and balances in council that has seen the local authority losing millions through failing to exercise due diligence in tender processes such as the case where the local authority received 10 single skip trucks instead of double skip trucks it had ordered from FAW Zimbabwe, resulting in a potential prejudice of US$288 000.
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