Council budgets must translate to services

13 Jan, 2023 - 00:01 0 Views

Suburban

The Ministry of Local Government and Public Works has approved proposed budgets of most urban and rural local authorities paving the way for the municipalities to start implementing their financial plans for the year 2023.

Announcing the approvals, Local Government and Public Works Minister July Moyo said the local authorities should now focus on delivering services to residents and ratepayers. Service delivery has proved to be a teething problem for most local authorities in Zimbabwe as they battle to collect refuse, provide clean water, repair traffic lights and street lights. 

This has seen some progressive residents and ratepayers coming to the rescue of the city councils, particularly in Harare where the Borrowdale Ratepayers and Residents Association is the torch bearer of making timely interventions to assist the financially crippled City of Harare. 

However, most local authorities’ billing systems are in shambles and failure to effectively resolve the billing problems might draw back their efforts to enhance revenue collection and be able to fund service delivery. 

Some local authorities like the City of Harare have indicated plans to introduce aggressive debt collection strategies. Whether this will work or not is a discussion for another day because Harare will have to contend with a Government directive barring local authorities from unleashing debt collectors on residents.

We believe the best way to enhance service delivery is to fix the billing system and charge for services provided. This is the quickest way out of depressed revenues because for as long as the City of Harare relies on estimates on services such as water and continues to bill residents for non-provided services, the mistrust between the property owners and the municipality will remain an albatross for the city.

In an interesting observation Minister Moyo said after the rigorous exercise to approve the budgets, central Government had noticed that most local authorities had “remarkably improved” their budgeting processes.

It is quite ironic because the observation comes at a time when councils are woefully failing to provide services. Residents will be eager to see how these stated improvements in budgeting will translate to services in their neighbourhoods. 

Minister Moyo added that all councils had been directed to produce by-laws by January 31, in order to support their budgets.

“This will ensure proper provision of quality services to their residents. Of the services that are provided by local authorities, water seems to cause problems except in such cities as Mutare,” he said. 

Mutare has adopted the Local Authorities Digital Systems (LADS), working together with the Harare Institute of Technology (HIT).

Minister Moyo urged local authorities to upgrade their Enterprise Resource Programmes (ERPS) to the LADS platform in order to raise their revenue collection capacities. We hope the Minister’s advice will be heeded because it seems some local authorities, Harare included, are reluctant to fix their billing systems, raising suspicions that council officials might be benefiting from the chaos.

We keenly wait for the “remarkably improved” budgets to start fixing our cities and towns because the deterioration cannot go on unabated. Residents need services, smart cities and towns.

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