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Municipal Reporter
Harare City Council has tasked town clerk Dr Tendai Mahachi to engage the Zimbabwe National Roads Authority over meagre disbursements of road funds to the city. The city says since the takeover of vehicle licensing by Zinara in 2009, not much revenue has accrued to council and that there is no clear basis of allocation of vehicle licensing fees to the city. According to the Environmental Management Committee minutes of September 2 this year, town clerk Dr Mahachi, reported that the Human Resources and General Purposes Committee had requested him to do a paper work to be presented to Cabinet requesting vehicle licensing to revert to local authorities.
Dr Mahachi reported that Zinara had written to him on areas of mutual interest and he requested authority to negotiate further with the authority.
Human Resources and General Purposes Committee chairperson, councillor Wellington Chikombo, yesterday said the city was failing to carry out road maintenance because of financial constraints.
“We are not getting reasonable disbursements from Zinara,” he said. “It is high time residents use trafficable roads but we cannot achieve that given the meagre resources we are getting,” he said.
According to the Finance and Development Committee minutes of September 11, the city’s acting finance director, Mr Tendai Kwenda, said there was need to lobby Government for a meaningful disbursement of funds from Zinara for road maintenance.
He said in 2009 the city anticipated a disbursement of $7 million, but was only given $654 000 and in 2010 the city got $4 042 000 against a requirement of $10 million.
In 2012 the city anticipated $11,8 million but was given $2 million and a Jet Patcher while in 2013 the city got another Jet Patcher and $550 000 against a requirement of $23 million.
Zinara collects license fees from more than 575 000 vehicles in its database and can collect more than $40 million from selling license discs.
Zinara only resumed disbursing funds directly to local authorities in February this year with the authority saying at least $1,7 million road maintenance funds would be given to urban and rural councils in the first quarter of 2014.
The authority had stopped direct disbursements of road maintenance funds to local authorities following allegations of abuse and misappropriation of the funds by councils.
Zinara said it will acquire a quarry plant, pre-mixer and recyclers for Harare but up to now nothing has materialised.
Efforts to get a comment from Zinara were fruitless as the management was said to be out of office.
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