Harare world class city status dream vanishes

Blessings Chidakwa

Herald Reporter

On February 13, 2014, our publication carried a story titled, ‘Vision 2025: Will Harare make it?’

A decade later and with only a day left to achieve that, the same questions stand.

Talk of water woes, sewer bursts, uncollected garbage, corruption, flawed billing system, shoddy land deals and potholed roads in southern suburbs.

Harare City Council’s ambitious target set in 2014 of being a world-class city by next year seems to be utopian.

Ten years later the city has done little if not nothing to achieve the feat with service delivery actually nose-diving.

An expert in urban environmental planning and environmental engineering, Simon Bere, in 2014 shared the insights of what Harare needed to do to achieve world class status.

He said the most important areas of service delivery that define a world class status are effectiveness and efficiency in the following water and transport provision, waste management, energy provision and leadership/management.

Based on these key tenets it is quite clear that Harare is still way off the mark.

Against global best practices, which rank the performance of cities according to progress on key aspects such as infrastructure, health care as well as service delivery, experts say the local authority has failed to prioritise a number of areas in the capital city.

Director of the Harare Residents’ Trust Mr Precious Shumba said Harare City Council Vision 2025 remains a mirage.

“It cannot be achieved under the current structural and institutional setup in the City of Harare. There are just too many contradictions at the policy-making level to comprehensively address the policy shortcomings of the City of Harare,” he said.

“At the bureaucratic level, there are huge gaps in terms of technical capacities among human resources.

“Key departments do not have substantive directors, like chamber secretary, chief legal officer, human capital, and finance which do not have a functional, transparent, and accountable enterprise resource plan.”

The BIQ system was abandoned in March 2019 and has not been replaced to accurately bill ratepayers. Mr Shumba said it has created several opportunities for corrupt bureaucrats to facilitate massive corruption in asset registration, financial accounting, procurement, and billing.

Combined Harare Residents Association director, Mr Reuben Akili said the vision was more like a boardroom decision made by a few individuals who were overambitious.

“And again, you realise that is the reason why this goal is failing because there were no agreed positions to say create a city we want in the next year, around 2025,” he said.

“From the look of things, in fact since the launch of that, we have been regressing in terms of social service provision.

“We had tarred roads, water in some areas and we had the functional sewer treatment plants when that vision was put in place and now the systems are partly functional.”

Harare Mayor, and Councillor Jacob Mafume admits the world-class city status vision will be missed, while stating the local authority is now racing against time to plug the gaps for a Chamber Secretary, Finance Director as well as a Human Capital Director.

“This was one of the major challenges that affected the vision and we are now looking to rectify,” he said.

A commission of inquiry has since been set up to investigate these milestones that have yoked the local authority over many years.

Experts say Town House has been turned into a citadel of lethargy which has come with a huge cost to the city.