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Local government media tracker – 07 October 2013
Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA)
October 07, 2013

Council owed US$3M
The Herald

The City of Harare is owed more than US$3 million by companies that advertise on billboards, a senior official has said. In an interview, City of Harare director of engineering services Engineer Philip Pfukwa said a few companies have paid up and those with outstanding arrears must pay their dues. “As City of Harare we let out sites for companies who advertise on billboards and would want to urge all companies who have billboards in and around the city to pay their dues,” Engineer Pfukwa said. We are owed over US$3 million but we are still reconciling the total figure at the moment.”

Kasukuwere wows to end water problems
The NewsDay

Government will focus on finishing dam construction projects across the country in the coming year to ensure constant supply of potable water, Environment, Water and Climate Minister Saviour Kasukuwere has said. In an interview, Kasukuwere said his Ministry was currently engaging a number of investors with a view to fund the projects in order to ease the country’s water shortage problems. “There are major investments in the coming year for Kunzvi Dam and other dams in the various provinces that have to be constructed so we have it on our plans as government. We are engaging a number of investors to see how we can fund these projects,” Kasukuwere said.

The construction of Kunzvi dam, the expected panacea to Harare’s perennial water problems, has been on the cards for over two decades. Kasukuwere said his Ministry would give special attention to finding ways to solve the country’s water problems. “We are looking at the water challenge in Zimbabwe. We have a water policy which basically has been crafted by government to address issues of provision of potable water to our people.

Council launches blitz
The Herald

Harare City Council has embarked on an extensive blitz to enforce payment of vending fees, rates and water bills. Town Clerk Dr Tendai Mahachi has confirmed the development. “We have sent out final demand notices to 11 000 households in low-density residential areas. The notices are for people who have failed to pay their new bills from July 2013 to date,” he said. Dr Mahachi said legal action would be taken against those defaulting on their payments and said a further 13 000 final notices were sent to Kuwadzana suburb. “Those in default will have their water supplies disconnected until they settle outstanding bills. An exercise to screen those not paying vending fees would be conducted next week. The city urges all residents to pay their bills whether they will be for residential properties, market places or business rentals,” he said. In market places like Mupedzanhamo, Mbare Musika, Mukambo and Lusaka People’s Market in Highfield only people with proof of payment would be permitted to vend.

‘Complete road tarring’
The Herald

Government has been urged to complete the tarring of the long-stalled Gutu-Kurai Road which serves areas where arguably the highest population concentration in Gutu district is found. Tarring of the road was stopped 15 years ago and some of the road-making equipment lies abandoned along the road which links Gutu to areas such as Bikita and Buhera in Manicaland. The road also links the populous Bhasera communal lands to major health centres such as Chimombe Rural Hospital and Mutero Clinic. Newly-elected Gutu Central National Assembly member Comrade Lovemore Matuke said Government is expected to finally show commitment to complete the project that has been on ice for the past 15 years. “We are appealing to Government and the relevant parliamentary portfolio committee to spare a thought for Gutu-Kurai Road whose construction has been stopped for the past 15 years. We feel it is high time this project is completed,’’ he said

City billing scandal exposed
The Herald

Some Harare City Council employees are reportedly manipulating loopholes in the city’s billing system to swindle unsuspecting residents of thousands of dollars, threatening to reverse the gains of Government’s chicanery involves the issuing of fake receipts and making residents pay for their accounts to be credited. In some cases, the workers would reportedly copy information from the BIQ system and place it on their personal laptops because the system has a loophole of auto credit or debit and they could tamper with the information and credit consumers with approximately US$5 000 before approaching them for a bribe.

Residents also voiced concern over estimate-based bills. Council’s business development director Mr Cosmas Zvikaramba confirmed that some council employees had devised ways of swindling the council and residents, and said measures had since been put in place to stop this. “What we have done internally is to come up with new receipts with added security features and we have ensured that only machines recognised on the council system can access the system. “We have also removed the functionality of the auto credit system and we have authorised a limited number of people to use journal vouchers as a way of mitigating the criminal activities,” he said.

The residents are scared that sooner than expected the bills will skyrocket if council continues to bill consumers using estimation. Residents are not aware of the extra 0.75cents that they are charged on residential sewage and an extra 0.98 cents on refuse collection charge in high densities.

Mr Zvikaramba said the 10 percent interest which residents were paying was a statutory requirement and council was mandated to charge 1 percent interest above interest rate on Government loans. He said residents who were querying their bills should visit council offices. On the issue of bills based on estimates, Mr Zvikaramba said 50 percent of the city’s water meters were not working hence they have to calculate bills based on estimates. ‘We calculate the average of the last six months when the metre was working,” he said. He urged residents to pay their bills at council offices or through platforms such as Ecocash.

Renovate sheds
The Herald

Commuter omnibus operators have urged Harare City Council to urgently renovate sheds at bus terminuses before the rains intensify. This comes as sheds at the city's 10 central business district terminuses are in a deplorable state and most of them have collapsed, posing a serious danger to commuters. Secretary General of the Urban Commuter Omnibus Operators' Association Mr Simbarashe Ngarande said commuter bus drivers often unilaterally increased fares taking advantage of commuters who would be rushing to avoid standing in the rain. "When it is raining, we get congested at ranks and there is a high risk of commuter operators hiking fares, leaving commuters with no option, but to board the buses for fear of getting wet," he said. "The City of Harare, the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing and the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Infrastructural Development should upgrade our terminal facilities to the benefit of the commuting public. As urban commuter operators, we want to see that our commuting public is well catered for since we are now approaching the rainy season."

Harare Town Clerk draws fire for being ‘autocratic’ in water deal
SW Radio

Harare Town Clerk, Dr Tendai Mahachi has been described as ‘autocratic’ and ‘evasive’ in a row over plans by the city to revamp the ailing water system. The multi-million dollar deal, which saw the Chinese government availing a loan of $144 million to the Harare city Council to revamp the water infrastructure built in the 1950’s, has been shrouded in secrecy. There are allegations the Town Clerk has stopped council employees from discussing the contents of the deal with anybody, let alone the newly elected mayor and Councilors.

While the deal is expected to bring normalcy in the supply of water to Harare, the issue of transparency remains the focal point. Harare currently gets supplied with 614 megalitres a day against demand of 1 300 megalitres for the more than four million people within Greater Harare.

Water woes to dog city for three years
The Herald

Harare residents will endure water shortages for the next three years as the city embarks on phased decommissioning of pumps at Morton Jaffray Water Treatment Plant to pave way for a protracted rehabilitation of the old machinery by Chinese engineers. The revamping of the treatment plant will boost water production at Morton Jaffray from 614 mega litres per day to 740 mega litres with attendant improvement in the quality of potable water due to a drastic reduction in chemical dosage from 70 to 35 milligrams per litre.

Sewage treatment will be boosted from 36 mega litres to 200 mega litres per day. Town clerk Dr Tendai Mahachi said the water shortages would be experienced in different parts of the city as council decommissions the 14 pumps at Morton Jaffray at different intervals. He was speaking during a tour of the water treatment plant by Chinese engineers, who immediately got to work by decommissioning three of the pumps. The engineers could be seen removing some of the dilapidated pumps from the plant.

During that time, the city will experience water shortages until the whole process is fully completed in the next three years." The Chinese Export Import Bank has since acquired material to be used for the refurbishment of the 60-year-old water treatment plant. Dr Mahachi said residents would undergo three years of water rationing to enable the city to increase water output to 80 percent of the city's requirements at the completion of the project. "Water production volume at Morton Jaffray is currently pegged at 614 mega litres of water per day and after rehabilitation there will be 740 mega litres," he said.

City mulls prepaid water meters
The Herald

The City of Harare is mulling the installation of prepaid water meters on all households, a development that is expected to resolve the issue of overcharging consumers. Addressing councillors among other senior council staff, Town Clerk Dr Tendai Mahachi said council had considered the idea to avoid overbilling ratepayers. "Meter readers who were giving information to council were not held accountable and the smart meters are meant to address the issues," said Dr Mahachi. "The smart meters will help to increase revenue and one is required to charge before water usage and they have proven to be cheaper for the households.

When there are Zesa power outages, there is a battery backup which works for a minimum of eight hours and installation will start in January next year. "The current meter readers will be redeployed to other areas," said Dr Mahachi. He further told the delegates that the city's top priority was the refurbishment of the Morton Jaffray water treatment plant. In a sideline interview Dr Mahachi said council has since applied to have the mandate of collecting traffic fines which are being pocketed by the police. "We have since applied so that we can collect traffic fines which will go towards the city's improvement. We have also lobbied for municipal courts like what is done in Johannesburg and Cape Town. "In terms of our application, we want the support from various Ministries so that they give us a nod and by January we will be having something," he said. Dr Mahachi also said the commuter omnibus holding bays are expected to be complete in the next three weeks.

We will work in harmony – Manyenyeni
The Herald

Harare's newly elected mayor Mr Bernard Manyenyeni says he expects to work in harmony with Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo and Zanu-PF councillors during his tenure. Mr Manyenyeni was elected mayor by fellow councillors. In an interview after a council workshop in Harare Mr Manyenyeni said the council would strive to serve everyone. There is a lot of catching up to do from the previous council and commission. There will always be a parent minister and there is always a city council and we will work well in that relationship. The passion has to be transformed into performance and results which will have an impact on our residents." Mr Manyenyeni said he was expecting to see great impact on health and housing among residents. He said he also expected council to avail adequate water to Harare during the refurbishment of the Morton Jaffray Water Treatment Plant.

There should be examination on procurement on chemicals and pricing. The last thing we want is to see residents coming to question us. The figure involved in the refurbishment of Morton Jaffray water treatment plant is too big to escape public scrutiny." Mr Manyenyeni was elected after efforts by the MDC-T to impose the party's Harare provincial spokesman Mr Obert Gutu failed. The MDC-T wanted to deliberately go against the Constitution which stipulates that mayors should emerge from elected councillors within the cities they serve.

Harare begins refurbishing water treatment plant
SW Radio

The Harare City council has begun to refurbish the capital’s main water treatment plant in an effort to end perennial water shortages. The four-year, $144 million project will affect dozens of the capital’s neighbourhoods, already reeling from water woes for years. It is anticipated that refurbishment of the plant under a Chinese loan facility will increase the water treatment capacity by 140 megalitres from the current average of 600 megalitres a day. From Morton Jaffray Water Works, the project will eventually extend to replacing kilometres of aging water mains throughout the capital. The pipes are about 60 years old. Almost 200km of dilapidated and leaking water reticulation pipes need to be replaced as well as another 100km of collapsed sewer pipeline. Currently the city loses up to 60 percent of treated water through leaks on the old pipelines.

Prepaid water meters: no longer giving a thirsty traveller a free glass of water
Kubatana.net

The Harare City Council (HCC) through its Water Department was recently reported in a local weekly as intending to introduce prepaid water meters by year end. This, soon after the much vaunted but under- analysed and on-going installation of prepaid meters for electricity. This stated intention of the HCC is most unfortunate and tantamount to the privatization of water, a development which would most certainly have the ancestors wondering what on earth our elected and appointed officials might be thinking. While there can be no argument against trying to find solutions to the challenge of citizens' access to clean and running water, this latest proposal by the capital’s city council may be more a matter of seeking to address an illness via its symptoms. Introducing prepaid water meters will not solve either the resource problems over and about either water treatment or its direct access by Harare residents. Neither will it build a much-needed new reservoir that is envisioned to supply greater Harare with water. Unless of course the intention of council is to clandestinely increase the council rates and water bills under the guise of what can only be misleadingly referred to as sustainable water usage via prepaid meters.

And these debates began when the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) and its subsidiary commercialized units began implementing the prepaid meter system. The issue then as it remains now was in tandem with the ‘use what you can pay for’ dictum. And it all appeared logical except that it has had the effect of making electricity available to only those that can pay for it. And in paying for it, consumers must now not only be frugal with the commodity but also deprive them of what now appears to be a luxury of cooking meals via electric stoves.

The prepaid electricity policy of ZESA has neither reduced power-cuts nor increased our electricity generation capacity. It has instead being a case of literally passing on the cost to the consumer without a proper assessment as to how and why electricity distribution has remained so inefficient. For some consumers it may appear to be better to have the little electricity that they can afford than having no electricity at all (if there are no blackouts). This however, does not make the policy any more democratic or responsive to the glaring need of improving the livelihoods of majority poor families. And this is the elephant in the room.

The convenience that the prepaid meters has given ZESA has probably been akin to a sigh of relief for the parastatals where regardless of its own inefficiencies, it passes on the cost to the consumer, and remorselessly so. For each transaction or top up of the prepaid meter, there are the fixed charges of the rural electrification levy together with a specific percentage of incurred debt that will have been accrued by the consumer. So essentially there is no new democratic departure point in the prepaid meter system. It’s just merely a smarter way to give the impression that it is the consumer that had always been a problem when the reality of the matter is that the challenges of electricity production in Zimbabwe do not begin with the end user.

It is this sort of archaic model that the HCC wants to impose on residents for water consumption, and by dint of the same probably export the model to other municipalities. Given that access to clean running water is a basic human right and directly relates to the right of all Zimbabweans to health, it is a development that does not bode well for recently elected local authority leaders. Water, like electricity needs calm approaches of balancing both cost and access. Prepaid meters are neither calm nor cost effective for overall supply of either water and electricity (hence the blackouts and dry taps). To seek to inadvertently privatise water under the guise of prepaid billing systems is patently undemocratic. Water is already a lucrative commodity via mineral water companies which sell it at commercial rates. For the HCC to want to adopt such an approach demonstrates that they are seeking an easier but symptomatic route out of the water crisis at the expense of the majority urban poor in Harare.

What the HCC intends to do is pass on the cost to the consumer while at the same time failing to resolve the overall water crises the capital city faces. And even then, the very problem of water supply does not have its genesis in the consumer, but in central and local government authorities who converted pre-2008 water bills from Zimbabwean to United States dollars without evident public consultation on conversion rates. Should the HCC go ahead with its plan either in pilot or full form, it will be a sad day for democracy in Zimbabwe. Of all the things to privatise, water must be sacred. But for some, they perhaps fail to realize that it is not money that makes us equal but common democratic values and collective humanity. And it all begins with giving each other a glass of water without thinking of how much it will cost.

U.S $300 000 sought
The Herald

Masvingo and Chivi Rural District Councils have appealed to Government for nearly US$300 000 to craft the Tokwe- Murkosi master plan ahead of the dam's completion before year-end. The two districts share the Tokwe-Mukorsi Dam which is being built along their border and the master plan would designate the land use pattern around what would become Zimbabwe's largest in-land water body upon completion. Acting Masvingo Provincial Administrator Mr Gorden Chipika said funds for the master plan would be released to the two local authorities through the Water, Environment and Climate ministry. Mr Chipika said work on the master plan would resume once funding has been made available by Government.

"Work on the Tokwe-Murkosi Dam master plan has not yet started because the two local authorities who will craft the plan, Chivi and Masvingo, have not yet received funds from Government. The master plan will be crafted once funds have been made available by Treasury through the Ministry of Water (Environment and Climate)," said Mr Chipika.

Ministry moves to end Harare water woes
All Africa

The illegal economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Western powers and their allies have contributed to the acute shortage of water in urban councils and dilapidated road infrastructure, Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo has said. Speaking at the interactive meeting on service delivery for Harare Dr Chombo said the World Bank stopped facilitating loans for the country because of the embargo. As a result, he said, Harare City Council had to source US$144 million from China's Import and Export Bank which will be channelled to the rehabilitation of Morton Jaffray Water Treatment Plant and the Prince Edward Water Station.

The event was attended by Parliamentarians, Minister of State for Harare Metropolitan Province Mrs Miriam Chikukwa, Harare mayor Bernard Manyenyeni, resident organisations' representatives and councillors. "We used to borrow money from the World Bank under what was called Urban 1 and 2 and it was used on houses and road construction, among others," said Dr Chombo. "Because of economic sanctions, we could not get anything and the only people who want to support us were the Chinese.

So, the Chinese engineers will install the pumps." Dr Chombo said the Chinese were not to be held accountable if Zimbabwean engineers installed the equipment at Morton Jaffray and that he signed as a guarantor together with former Finance Minister Tendai Biti. He further explained that residents should expect feedback from councillors they voted into office for the sake of progress. Minister Chombo urged home-seekers to desist from acquiring residential stands from unscrupulous co-operatives. Upon being asked on who they consulted when they borrowed the money and why they did not wholly employ local engineers at Morton Jaffray, Harare Town Clerk Dr Tendai Mahachi said technology and machinery used on the rehabilitation process was new to local engineers who required undergoing training. "They are transferring technology to our people and they will work with Zimbabwean companies and at the same time transferring technology so that in the future we can commission the plants.

‘Introduction of pre-paid water meters anti-poor’
Zimbabwe Independent

The life of Miriam Mhizha of Chitungwiza is a tale of increasing despair as she contemplates that her perennial struggle to make ends meet is set to become even more gruelling. With the introduction of the pre-payment system for utilities, she could sink deeper into poverty as she cannot afford to meet the cost of such essentials on her meagre salary of US$200 a month. In addition to the rent and electricity bills she has to pay in advance, Mhizha - a single mother of two who works at a clothing retail shop in Harare - will soon also have to pay her water bill upfront if the City of Harare installs pre-paid water meters at all households as planned. From her US$200 monthly salary, Mhizha has to fork out US$80 for rent, an average US$30 for electricity and US$20 for water, meaning she would have to pay around US$130 in advance when the pre-paid water meters are installed. With the remaining US$70, she needs at least US$44 a month for transport costs, leaving US$26 for food, clothing and other day-to-day necessities like firewood and candles as power cuts are frequent and often unscheduled. Mhizha says pre-payment increases the onerous financial burden on the poor, who constitute 62% of Zimbabwe's population, according to 2012 statistics. "Post-paid accounts gave individuals the leeway to plan how to settle debts and when funds were not permitting one could ignore some of the debts, but settle them later. But now you can't do that. This is cruel, especially for the poor.

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