HARARE, Zimbabwe’s capital, has often been used as a laboratory guinea pig for neoliberal ideas. The city is now largely private in its provision of services to the residents and the latest fad is privatisation of refuse collection.
Back in 1997, two years after dumping the International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic structural adjustment programme — the city privatised urban public transport services. This was done through deregulation of public transport that had been hitherto been an exclusive domain of Zupco. Private commuter omnibuses were licensed to ply the urban roads.
Kombis then were deemed convenient and more efficient for moving commuters. Our political honchos did not envisage the chaos – a traffic jungle that Harare is today. It did not occur to them that London, Amsterdam, Paris or Berlin, the metropolitan cities at the heart of neoliberal economies in Western Europe still had functional public transport services, whose hallmark is timetable-based services to keep the economy ticking.
This was about the same time that Harare also deregularised property development, particularly urban housing. Housing co-operatives sprouted in the city, taking large swathes of municipal or state land to develop new suburbs that in many areas became slums because of relaxed building regulations.
This was too immediately followed by allowing bottle stores to sprout across the suburbs, in the process driving the city’s Rufaro Marketing into the red. No one cared then about what these bottle-stores would do to the fabric of the community and how much impact it would have on the city revenues.
The city opened up the health and education sector. Private pre-schools, primary schools and colleges became normal. Some residential properties were turned into schools. Schools without any play grounds or social amenities. It was also the time private clinics and hospitals sprouted in the suburbs.
The city too is planning to privatise traffic management by having a private player set up surveillance cameras and get money from traffic fines. Then what is the function of the city’s traffic department?
Let's fast forward on this privatisation agenda. The city experimented with pre-paid water and electricity. It is interesting that since this experiment started these services have become more erratic and intermittent. It has even privatised city parking and public gardens.
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Only this week, Harare is about to privatise a basic service such as refuse collection. Interestingly enough, this decision needed the whole cabinet — I mean a whole cabinet chaired by the President — to decide privatising waste collection. It is neither here nor there, the decision was made in favour of a private company that made an unsolicited bid to the Local Government ministry.
The Cabinet said in a statement: “Cabinet received and approved an update on the proposed privatisation of the Harare waste management, as presented by the Local Government and Public Works minister Daniel Garwe.”
The statement added that the city had approached the central government admitting its failure to provide solid waste management — such a basic service — hence it was seeking permission to have it privatised.
“The Harare City Council has also formally requested that the central government take over the collection of solid waste management, citing the local authority’s inability to perform the mandate as expected. The Local Government and Public Works ministry is now working on putting in place functional systems, companies and institutions to collect refuse,” the Cabinet said.
It needs no rocket science that the privatisation of these services has benefitted “businesses” of Zanu PF cronies. They run the private schools, private hospitals and are the principal land barons post the 2000 land reform. I put the word business in quotations because they are not businesses. They thrive on public tenders. They are tenderpreneurs. They feast on the state largesse.
Not only is the government privatising Harare, it now wants to compete with Nick Prices’ Republic of Borrowdale Brooke. It has invited private capital for the development of a private new city in Mt Hampden — Emmersonville.
These privatisation experiments have only helped to expose how unequal Zimbabwe as a society has become. Where art thou is the future of a government — in all its forms — both local and central? How will the lumpen proletariat survive?
It is not only Harare, but the central government has started the process of privatising parastatals under the Mutapa Investment Fund (MIF). Only recently, MIF executives were in London seeking new investors into the parastatals who can get up to 74% of the equity in the companies. It is privatisation on steroids.
On Wednesday, Finance deputy minister David Kudakwashe Mnangagwa was very clear in parliament that the government is seeking partners to renovate and refurbish National Sports Stadium on a public-private partnership. My mind raced to think, which serious nation does not have a stadium?
Even the United Kingdom has Wembley as a national stadium.
Privatising the National Sports Stadium means many people and associations that hitherto had been accessing the stadium will not be able to after its commercialisation. One wonders what the government is really thinking. It is a government for the people and should lead/rule in the interest of the public it serves. I don’t think that is asking too much from an elected government.
After all is said and done, serious questions have to be asked: what is the role of the city if it can’t provide public educational facilities, public primary health care centres, playgrounds, public city gardens, street lighting or even urban planning and refuse collection? Does only a city exist to pay the salaries of the executives?
It is time that the citizens/residents should start fighting back against wholesale privatisation of public assets and services. The line should be drawn and boldly stated no more. If leaders are failing, they should step down, privatisation is not a panacea of problems.
Harare needs leadership. The country needs leadership; however, it’s sorely missing at the moment — as private consultants seem to be taking over.
- Paidamoyo Muzulu is a journalist based in Harare. He writes here in his personal capacity.
