HARARE City Council under the mayorship of Jacob Mafume is breaking all records on mismanagement, maladministration and corruption.
It is a city that can spend US$11 million on workshops, but cannot collect garbage or provide water to its residents.
The ongoing commission of inquiry led by retired judge Justice Mafios Cheda, which is probing the city’s financial management from 2017 to date , this week exposed the rot in the council.
Residents for the first time heard of the amounts splurged on workshops — a whopping US$11 million in just under two years.
In fact, workshops had become a source of livelihood for most councillors.
The city fathers and mothers got into office with a plan, a well-crafted one, of milking the city dry making it their feeding trough.
Service delivery is a secondary issue, so peripheral that a resident asking about it would look like a perfect candidate for mental examination.
Maladministration, sleaze and corruption are now the norm rather than an exception.
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It has become well entrenched to the extent that Mafume has mockingly been christened Doink.
To the uninitiated, Doink is a wrestling character in the 1990s. Yes, character because wrestling is a staged entertainment.
Doink was a character that behaved like a circus monkey, providing thrills to millions of viewers across the globe — whether winning or losing.
Mafume, like Doink, struts the streets and the chambers like someone really serious, but we all now know it’s a charade.
He is mayor in a city that cannot provide basic services to its residents like potable water, refuse collection, attending to burst sewer pipes, town planning or even street lighting.
The city is dysfunctional to the extent that it does not have an inventory of its assets and neither can it bill its residents in real time.
It does not have an enterprise resource planning system to account for its revenues.
No one knows how many bank accounts it has.
No wonder why the city senior executives are all in acting capacities.
It is clear that all this man-made chaos is deliberately fanned so that the councillors can loot and ooh boy, they are looting the city dry.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has awoken from his slumber and is trying to restore normalcy to the city.
While the setting up of the Cheda Commission is noble, it, however, suffers credibility because what obtains in Harare is the same at central government.
Successive audits of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) by the Office of Auditor-General have revealed that the central government is not any better than Harare in public finance management.
The majority of the MDAs do not have updated inventories of their assets.
They also splurge on workshops and perks of their executives, luxury vehicles and many do not have substantive executives.
The public hospitals, schools and roads are all in a sorry state.
Parastatals are limping or in the majority of cases, technically insolvent and contribute no more than 5% of Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product from a high of nearly 40% soon after independence in 1980.
So, why in this context does the kettle call the pot black?
The answer is simple: It’s politics stupid!
The so-called second republic post the November 2017 military coup has not done anything different on use of public funds.
It continues to give contracts to dubious characters, splurge on luxury vehicles and have bloated delegations to international conferences.
Stark examples are the Conference of Parties (COP28) meeting on Climate Change in Scotland.
Over 70 delegates attended and some had the temerity to splash their pictures on social media hoarding the finest scotch-whiskeys.
No shame! No pride!
These are not the only examples.
One can imagine a whole government giving a US$87 million tender to supply goats to politically-connected individuals with shady backgrounds.
Arraigning them before the courts is a clean-up after the act.
This is the same government that has spent millions on trips by the First Lady with her entourage to Eastern Europe and many European destinations with no tangible results.
It is for the first time in our history that a First Lady can have so many visits alone and her team.
The norm across the world is that the First Lady travels with the President and does her stuff on the sidelines.
Actually, the biggest shock is having a private lounge for the First Lady at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport in Harare.
Before we get carried away, the Al Jazeera documentary The Gold Mafia gave us insights into how the central government leaders aid and abet corruption and smuggling.
In one scene, a gold dealer calls a senior leader Mr Jones.
I would not want to comment on what such a name implied.
It is evident that what happens in Harare City is only a fraction of what happens in Zimbabwe at large.
It is true that Harare has stagnated in the last 20 years under the leadership of the opposition.
It has become haphazard, dirty and perennially broke.
However, the big question is: Which local authorities have fared any better on service provision?
The answer is simple. We need new politics in Zimbabwe: Politics of service delivery, politics of punishing those who abuse public resources. Politics of men and women with integrity. Politics of developing Zimbabwe.This should not be merely rhetoric, but should be seen to be happening.
Perhaps, the starting point is dealing with reports of commissions that were done in the last seven years.
These include the Land Audit Commission, the Ernst & Young inquiry into skills and qualifications audit in public service.
It is not in any doubt that Harare is a crime scene, but Zimbabwe today needs a holistic look at governance infrastructure starting right at the top — central government.
A piece-meal approach is open to challenges on grounds of political partisanship or trying to kick the opposition out of urban councils.
Zanu PF cannot be allowed in urban councils through the back door.
Let’s change the systems right across the board, otherwise anything else is mere politicking.
- Paidamoyo Muzulu is a journalist based in Harare. He writes here in his personal capacity.
