daniel chigunwe
Herald Reporter
HARARE Mayor Councillor Jacob Mafume has criticised the City’s top management for agreeing to get rid of an effective Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, in a bid to avoid accountability and conceal serious financial mismanagement.
This comes amid revelations that several properties owned by the City have vanished while some of its companies have been neglected, with no effective revival strategy in place.
He dropped the bombshell during his testimony before the Retired Justice Maphios Cheda-led commission, which is investigating the operations of the city since 2017.
Clr Mafume revealed that top management had conspired to get rid of an effective ERP system, leaving them in the dark about the city’s financial dealings.
“The problem is that management conspired to get rid of an effective Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, so we don’t know what is happening,” he said.
“We need an effective ERP system to manage our properties, but there was a deliberate move not to incorporate properties into the ERP system.”
Clr Mafume said the absence of an ERP system was crippling service delivery, claiming that some funds were being looted.
“The ERP is the only tool that the Auditor General and even us, the Councillors, can help us understand what is happening in finances.
“However, management conspired to get rid of the ERP. Since 2019, the City Council has not been able to produce audited accounts.”
He claimed to have protested many times over the abandonment of an effective ERP system, but his concerns fell on deaf ears.
Asked why council subsidiaries were not being co-opted back into the city, Clr Mafume replied that it wouldn’t make sense to transfer them into an equally chaotic system.
“You cannot transfer assets or resources to a place where there is equal chaos. What is needed is an effective Enterprise Resource Planning system, but as things stand, you cannot detect if there are illicit deals going on.
“Council is not benefitting. It is the biggest property owner after Government, but it is not benefitting at all,” said Clr Mafume.
His testimony before the Commission was adjourned to February 4, temporarily halting his grilling over the city council’s affairs.
In May last year, President Mnangagwa appointed the Commission to probe the operations of Harare City Council and its business units from 2017 to date.
The Commission has so far uncovered a web of scandals at Harare City Council, including the disappearance of US$105 million and annual losses of US$70 million due to inadequate systems while a US$4,5 million loan facility allocated to Harare Quarry vanished.
It has also emerged that 100 head of cattle were being stolen monthly, 60 000 houses were not being billed, and over 5 000 illegal stands were parcelled out ahead of the harmonised elections, with 350 housing co-operatives illegally regularised.
Since the beginning of public hearings, it has been a dog-eat-dog scenario, where everyone has been trying to throw each other under the bus to avoid taking the fall.
