Suburban
THE Harare Residents Trust has urged the City of Harare to resume monthly water meter readings to charge residents for actual water consumption and consistent garbage collection to increase its revenue.
Suburban Reporter
In a statement on the relentless billing chaos at the municipality, the residents’ body said the one way the city could increase its revenue collection was fixing the shambolic billing system among other remedies.
“Greetings residents. What is your average bill per month from the City of Harare? The current chaotic billing system, which is not a billing system at all, has a running contract with the City of Harare until October 31, 2022.
“To increase revenue collection, the Harare Residents’ Trust believes that the City of Harare should replace all dysfunctional water meters and start monthly water meter readings in order to charge residents for actual water consumption, consistently collect garbage from households, industries and the city centre.
“The Harare Residents’ Trust believes that the City of Harare should take full control of City Parking, be accountable and transparent on the council farms, Harare Quarry and procurement of goods and services,” the HRT said in the statement published on its social media platforms.
The residents’ representative body urged the municipality to introduce an electronic housing waiting list which has none or very little human interaction between applicants and council workers.
It also advised council to replace underground water and sewerage pipes in a phased approach that begins with the oldest suburbs.
“Residents, you are free to suggest more ways to harness all the council revenues and cut down on financial leakages,” the residents’ body said.
Last month, council announced it had flighted a tender for a new billing system following the numerous problems that have dogged the current system.
Council expects the winning bidder to immediately provide the new billing system once the tendering process has been completed.
Since the withdrawal of the BIQ billing system in 2019, the municipality’s billing has been shambolic with the local authority battling with a new system that saw it failing to produce monthly bills on time.
The BIQ, provided by Quill Associates, a South African system developer, was itself not so accurate but the billing crisis worsened with the new system which was failing to capture and reconcile payments made by ratepayers.
This left the municipality to rely on estimates, particularly on water charges, which residents felt was unfair because council tap water was not readily available to most of them.
Residents are also being billed twice a month for refuse collection, which council is failing to provide.
Under the new system, council was urging residents to pay their bills while receipting was being done offline sometimes with no updates done on payments made.
The latest attempt to fix the billing mess follows challenges that the city says it has been having with its servers and storage.
Speaking at a City of Harare service delivery meeting for Ward 7 held on July 16, Cllr Mafume said the city currently does not have enough internal servers to store data.
He was answering a question from a resident who asked if the mayor was going to make a plan to computerise the billing of rates.
“We had a problem with our billing system.
“We have put out a tender for the billing system which is going to be implemented in August.
“And the other thing has been with our storage. We have been having a problem with our internal computer people.
“We don’t have enough internal servers to store data and what they have been trying to do is to create a hardware server ecosystem,” said Cllr Mafume.
He said the municipality was mulling the idea of using cloud computing to solve the billing dilemma through local service providers such as TelOne, Econet or Liquid.
Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or a personal computer.
It can also be described as the delivery of computing services including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and intelligence over the internet (the cloud) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources and economies of scale.
“Our argument as councillors is there is cloud computing. TelOne, Econet and many other people are offering the cloud.
“There is no point, with our problems of not having electricity, maintenance and keeping those things at the required maintenance level, to buy a system that is going to knock us back close to US$500 000.
“My bet is it will not work anyway if we are going to go by precedence.
“I would rather we speak to Econet, TelOne or Liquid or whoever is offering cloud capacity. We pay for it then we create a database that is both historic and instant. So the problem has been a hardware issue and a software issue.
“But I think we are coming to a close to that situation. By August we should be getting the system up.
“By then, we should have hired cloud capacity to store our current data and our historic data so that people can then interact with their own accounts based on historical and instant information but we take your suggestion and we are going to adopt it,” said the Mayor.
Cllr Mafume said council will give terms of conditions to the company that will have won the tender.
“If they cannot do it within six months, we are going to fire them and get other people because we have been discussing it since 2013 that we need data stored.
“We need to have the ability to pay our bills wherever we are in the world,” he said.
Cllr Mafume had promised to announce the timeframes for the completion of the project during his State of the City Address but did not do so.
