adminIG: The Harare Residents Trust has been monitoring service delivery and events at Town House. Are you happy, if so why?
PS: The Harare Residents’ Trust has been monitoring service provision by all service providers, including the City of Harare, in terms of the organisation’s Objective Number 4 – to monitor and audit the performance of service providers so that they deliver quality and affordable services to the citizenry.
We are most disappointed with the level of service provision, especially in areas of water delivery – the quality is atrocious, residents are complaining of stomach ache and diarrhoeal diseases like typhoid. Most of the time, the water coming out of taps is smelly, has visible impurities.
IG: Where is this happening?
PS: In areas like Crowborough, Dzivarasekwa and Glen Norah, Budiriro, residents have had the occasion to open their taps and witness sadza and vegetable particles, raising genuine fears of the quality and suitability of the city’s water for human consumption. Secondly, the city has dismally failed to involve residents in its programming, resulting in wrong and misplaced priorities that are contradictory to residents’ expectations, the road network is too bad, and requires extensive maintenance and upgrade, elected councillors have not effectively played the representative role they were elected to provide.
IG: Where according to the Trust have they failed?
PS: Refuse collection is apparently non-existent with heaps of uncollected garbage at most public places and street corners in high density suburbs and industrial areas, yet residents continue to be charged for this service for once a week refuse collections. Books of accounts of the council remain a secret, meaning they continue to budget and plan without accountability, yet still expect residents to pay all outstanding bills.
IG: What then, have been their priorities?
PS: The council has prioritised purchase of luxury vehicles, attending workshops and other such similar activities, including the continued hiring of personnel when it is clear the city of Harare has no financial capacity to pay its bloated workforce, which remain largely unaccountable to the residents and other stakeholders.
To the HRT it is at both levels . . . the senior management up to the executive do not co-ordinate work, resulting in this current confusion around the Amenities Department where the director has been sidelined with his key responsibilities taken over by the town clerk.
The duties and responsibilities of district officers, who are the intermediaries between council management and the residents have been illegally usurped by the executive who have refused to abide by council’s resolution of December 23 2008 to restore the powers of the district officers, thereby compromising service delivery. Now people do not get real services in their communities but have to call other offices either at Rowan Martin, or at Remembrance Drive where decisions take long to be made, frustrating the ratepayer.
IG: You talked about the workers and the management how about the councillors?
PS: The councillors are equally to blame as they have failed in their policy-making role to protect the interests of residents, who voted them into office. Instead of defending the residents, most of the councillors defend the executive of council who are the people really in charge of council administration. Councillors are primarily policy-makers and the executive must implement the policies and resolutions.
IG: Can you give an insight on the calibre of councillors at Harare City Council?
PS: In the 29 March 2008 harmonised elections, the residents had high hopes, which have turned into nightmares. We have greedy, corrupt and cunning councillors, who lack the passion and drive to deal with substantial issues of turning around the fortunes of the City of Harare. They are mainly driven by an undying desire to accumulate wealth and pick up petty fights with anyone who dares challenge them and hold them accountable including their own party, and among themselves. They lack the right attitude required to build the city to become a sunshine city.
Coupled with these observations, you need also to appreciate the apparent lack of expertise and professionalism among them, as they have to deal with technocrats and highly experienced bureaucrats who have been in council for more than two decades in some instances, and these usually give their own historical perspectives, hindering councillors’’ ability to deal with issues in a more pragmatic manner.
IG: As residents when did you start noticing that the councillors you voted for were the wrong calibre?
PS: For the period 2008-2010, the majority if not all the councillors were pursuing a confrontational and anti-Zanu PF attitude, branding every senior manager as Zanu-PF and therefore perceived to be serving a different political master. From 2011 to present, these councillors have been positioning themselves to make more money and accumulate more wealth to themselves. They have deliberately shut out residents, preferring instead, to hold their party meetings, attended mainly by party executives and activists, who are not necessarily the majority voters, who should be getting frequent feedback on council’s plans. The majority of them lack a serious appreciation of local government as a whole.
IG: So, are the councillors still representing those who voted them into office?
PS: The majority of the councillors in Harare have abandoned the electorate, and therefore in our view no longer serve the purpose for which they were elected. They mainly represent themselves, judging from their council minutes and other meeting records, where they spend more time fighting over tenders, playing power games, instead of prioritising water delivery, how to combat typhoid, housing delivery, the chaotic billing system of council, road maintenance and other pertinent service delivery challenges.
IG: Can you shed light on the allegations of corruption?
PS: In our view, from our own evaluation of the council’s performance, we have consistently raised the issue of corruption in Harare where councillors have been reportedly receiving kickbacks in stands allocation, tender processes, and illegally converting spaces designated for clinics, shops and schools, into residential stands, mainly through housing co-operatives set up by councillors and their associates. We have evidence of this in areas like Budiriro and Glen Norah. Corruption is rampant. The MDC-T has only recently acted on these allegations but for a very long time the HRT has constantly raised cases of alleged corruption from 2009 but no action had been taken.
IG: So do residents feel vindicated?
PS: Yes, sure! In this instance, we have reason to feel vindicated, as the MDC-T eventually acted on some of the issues we had previously raised. However, there are other councillors that have previously been censured for corrupt behaviour and other misdemeanors who have remained in the MDC-T and in council because they are cunning, and not necessarily because they are clean.
IG: What have they done to avert detection?
PS: Some have even registered assets in the names of their spouses and family members to avoid being caught with a huge asset base in comparison to what they owned before they were elected councillors.
Remember, that when they were elected into office, the majority of these councillors had nothing. They got donations of suits and shoes from the Mayor and other party officials to enable them to attend meetings of council, but now the same have become flamboyant, imitating Nigerian dressing, and trying to compete with salaried senior managers in terms of the things they can afford.
We question the source of that money, and why some have relocated from their original bases of residence, away from the people who voted them into office. Councillors earn an allowance of around US$200, raising suspicions about their income generating activities, which only began after being elected into office, or after serving council in a certain committee. Corruption is rampant!
IG: So these councillors no longer stay with the people who voted them into office?
PS: Few have officially relocated but the majority remain within their communities, despite being reported to have constructed their own houses in other suburbs where they spend most of their time. Some are afraid of going to their new houses because of fears of being exposed, given the investigations that the MDC-T conducted, and the continued threats of dismissals and suspensions by Local Government, Rural and Urban Development Minister Ignatius Chombo. The electorate, the people who voted them into office feel orphaned, abandoned and rejected.
IG: Now that elections are imminent . . .
PS: Given the prospect of elections, you find that councillors have been active during the holidays trying to reopen their lines of communication with mainly the party activists, who they occasionally call “throwers’’.
IG: Do you think the majority of the councillors with be retained by voters if elections were to be held today?
PS: In our view, 95 percent, if not more, will not be re-elected if residents remain serious on service delivery and not be misled by false promises and excuses, justifying their failure. Harare had 46 councillors elected in march 2008, representing the electorate in each of the 46 ward boundaries, and 11 were appointed by the minister in terms of the Urban Councils Act. Two of the elected have passed on, while six were dismissed by the minister for various offences while four were dismissed from the MDC-T, meaning they are already out of it as councillors, once this current term expires.
The City of Harare has to focus on the needs and priorities of residents like revising their income projections by reflecting the incomes of the majority of their clients, who are either out of jobs, or earn very little to sustain their lives. This has the impact of increasing the revenue that the council can generate if more people feel the rates and rentals are reasonable and justified.
Online Reporter