Back to Index

Residents' position on ward based billing in Chitungwiza
Chitungwiza Residents Trust (CHITREST)
November 28, 2013

The Chitungwiza Residents Trust (CHITREST) has been attending ward-based consultative meetings by the local authority in the past month. Topical issues raised at these platforms include ward based billing, ward based waste management, pre-paid water metering and the illegal allocation of land.

It is however, the issue of ward based billing that evoked serious debate among residents. Ward based billing, a new concept being mooted by council, is a strategy of assessing the contribution of each ward towards service provision. Eventually council would want to render services in correlation to the level of payment by each ward.

This is unheard of in Zimbabwe and as residents we feel that this is an overt form of discrimination which is totally unconstitutional and unacceptable as this might render some citizens 'strangers' in their motherland. Statistically, in a poorly paying ward of say 1000 households, a 1/4 might be religiously meeting their obligations but would inevitably be prejudiced by those defaulting. These 250 paying residents would not be in a position to uproot their houses to a paying ward, therefore in the long-run there will be no justification for them to continue paying their rates when they will be getting a raw deal.

This alienation of other wards, for example through refuse collection, will create hot-spots of communicable diseases like cholera and typhoid which will naturally spread throughout the whole town and even affect the so-called paying wards. In this day and era, 33 years after attaining independence as a country, we cannot as residents celebrate or tolerate the bringing back of Ian Douglas Smith's segregative policies.

We urge council to treat residents as equal and desist from this 'divide and rule' approach which is grossly unfair and inequitable but instead spearhead a uniform service delivery system.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP