Online Reporter
Trust Freddy
Herald Correspondent
HARARE Mayor Councillor Jacob Mafume has publicly accused municipal police in the licensing department of collecting bribes and “protection fees” from business owners, claiming that council executives are deliberately resisting the digitalisation of the
licensing system to facilitate the illicit activity.
Speaking at a heated full council meeting on Wednesday, the mayor said the current manual licensing process was being maintained to allow funds to be siphoned off through graft.
“All our departments must digitalise… we cannot license shops from our heads, with three municipal officers moving around every shop wearing your hats, taking bribes in this day and age,” the mayor said.
An ERP system is a type of software that organisations use to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.
Mayor Mufume insisted that the proposed digital systems, which he claimed “work perfectly everywhere”, are being intentionally deemed problematic within the council to preserve opportunities for corruption.
“Every time we say let’s bring a modern system, you always say it has a problem simply because you want to move around every shop taking bribes, harassing people, taking goods, but it’s something that should be done by computers,” he claimed.
He also criticised the executives’ reliance on endless “blitzes and taskforces”, arguing that these functions should be performed seamlessly by digital systems, reducing human interaction and the potential for extortion.
“In all the countries that we go to, have you ever bumped into a municipal officer in Moscow collecting licensing fees in shops?
“Here in Harare, however, at every restaurant I go to, I always see at least three municipal officers coming to make inquiries about licenses. Then, a moment later, you see them going behind the restaurant.
“When you ask them why municipal officers always come every day, you are told that they come every day to take protection fees.”
The city council has been operating without a requisite accounting system since 2019 after a supplier of its ERP system, Quill Associates, withdrew its software following a contractual wrangle.
