Suburban
THE Borrowdale Ratepayers and Residents Association (BRRA) has commended the steps the City of Harare’s Human Resources Committee is taking to improve productivity among council workers, rid the local authority of corruption and bring sanity to its operations.
Peter Tanyanyiwa Suburban Reporter
The committee recently revealed that Harare has not been job conducting evaluations for the past 30 years a situation which is partly to blame for the deterioration in service delivery in the capital.
Good corporate governance practices envisage that organisations must carry out job evaluation exercises at least once every three years.
The committee is also seeking to change things at the municipality and correct certain wrongs which past administrations have been making in order to improve service delivery.
Ward 41 Councillor Kudzai Kadzombe chairs the Human Resources Committee.
“We are happy to announce that after nearly 30 years, the City of Harare is embarking on a job evaluation for the local authority. According to the principles of good corporate governance job evaluations are supposed to be done every three years. But for us it has been quite a long time and we felt it had to be done.
Because of the lack of job evaluation, a lot of positions which are no longer relevant continue being in existence. We have many unnecessary positions and duplication of duties. We also couldn’t change our structures because of this.
“We are going to amend the current organogram as we make the changes. The process has already started. We have done all the necessary stakeholder engagement processes necessary. We have also awarded two human resources s firms (contracts) to do the job evaluation and they assured us that they should be done with the process after five months,” Cllr Kadzombe said recently.
In an interview BRRA chairperson, Mr Robert Mutyasira said they were pleased with the efforts the committee has been making because council has been carrying a lot of dead wood which has resulted in corruption and lack of service delivery.
“We are pleased with the comments of the chairperson of the City of Harare Human Resources Committee chairperson Councillor Kudzai Kadzombe, where she acknowledges the need to resume job evaluations after three decades. Council is carrying a lot of deadwood and that is affecting service delivery and good governance within the entity,” said Mr Mutyasira.
The committee also announced a few weeks ago that it had come up with a performance review strategy under which council officials will be given set targets in a bid to improve service delivery.
District officers and revenue officers, in particular, will be given targets and assessed based on agreed targets as part of a raft of changes the committee is introducing to help improve service delivery, which is presently at an all-time low.
The committee is also aiming to decentralise some council operations so that district offices can be capacitated to carry out services such as refuse collection and maintaining their wards clean.
The committee said it had also noticed that there were gaps in terms of council structures, which will in turn affect service delivery. The gaps also constrain council workers from effectively providing services to residents on the ground hence the decision to revamp some of the council workforce structures.
