adminInnocent Ruwende Harare Bureau
Most of the country’s local authorities are still using laws inherited from Rhodesia some of which have serious colonial connotations unfit for the prevailing environment 34 years after independence.
One such obsolete law is the Regional, Town and Country Planning Act which is the core planning law in Zimbabwe and has been widely criticised for being rigid.The High Court recently stopped all municipalities from disconnecting water supplies for defaulting residents without seeking recourse to the courts of law, describing as illegal Section 8 of the Water By-Law Statutory Instrument 164 of 1913.
The Urban Councils’ Association of Zimbabwe (UCAZ) president Clr Martin Moyo said yesterday that urgent action was needed to amend or repeal the offending laws which were serving no purpose.
“The onus is on respective councils to look at their statutes and revise them accordingly,” said the Bulawayo mayor. “Laws which have colonial and derogatory language have no place in the prevailing environment.
“The problem is some of these laws are not known, but are only discovered when something happens. They are not uniform because every council has different by-laws.”
Harare is the worst affected and still has such laws as the Salisbury (Protection of Lands) 1972 By-Laws, which it is seeking to amend and change its name to Harare (Protection of Marginalised Land) By-Laws 2014.
The city’s acting Town Clerk Josephine Ncube told the Environmental Management Committee that her office was in the process of updating various council by-laws to put them in line with current trends.
She said the Salisbury (Protection of Lands) 1972 By-Laws was one such law.
“The first problem with the by-laws she was seeking to repeal was its title,” read part of the committee’s minutes of June 24. “The by-laws were cited as the Salisbury (Protection of Lands) By-Laws 1973.
“Salisbury was the capital of the then Rhodesia. Since we are now in an independent Zimbabwe, there was no longer Salisbury, but Harare. The citation of the by-laws had to, therefore, reflect the new political dispensation.”
Ncube said another area of major concern was the fact that the 1973 by-laws still derived from the long repealed Urban Councils Act (Chapter 2:14) and this created serious legal hurdles.
She said the law had some colonial connotations as it defined the title “director” as the person holding the office under the council as director of African administration.
“This form of apartheid no longer obtained in the current political and local government set-up,” said Ncube. “Again, the by-laws made reference to a ‘shanty’. This again was a colonially derogatory word and such words are no longer referred to.
“Apart from the by-laws being barely two pages, there was no provision that dealt with offences and penalties. This anomaly made the by-laws difficult if not impossible to enforce.”
Ncube said the laws were too general as they merely referred to land when in actual fact the land they sought to protect was marginalised land, adding that the new laws would seek to address the shortfall.
The new laws will cover the prohibition of certain activities on marginalised land such as building, dredging and excavating.
The marginalised land will include wetlands, sloppy area, hills, land within 30 metres of naturally defined banks of a stream and land within 30 metres of the high flood level of any body of water conserved in artificially constructed water stage beds, banks of any river or stream.
The city’s committee expressed concern that most of the fines were not deterrent as they were too low and reiterated the need for the legal division to recommend to the relevant ministry to have them reviewed upwards.
Online Reporter