A Structured Crisis in Zimbabwe Local Government

By Takura Zhangazha*

There have been a number of very curious and politicized debates about the status of Zimbabwe’s local government in recent weeks.  Not least because of the Cheda Commission of Inquiry into what has been happening with the City of Harare’s financial and other transactions.  

More recently there was a media publicized allegation that the City of Harare had spent roughly US$11 million on workshops for its councilors and staff.  A figure that has recently been disputed by the current mayor.  He has whittled it down to at least US$ 2 million.

There have also been other scandals that are in the public domain.  These include land transactions, change of land use patterns from agricultural to residential or even industrial to again residential. Not only in Harare but also every other major city in Zimbabwe.  These stories do not always come out until there is a court case about either ownership or the legality of the transaction.

But as it is, local government (LG) and its general or even specific public accountability is in serious trouble in Zimbabwe.  And so is the central Ministry of Local Government and its ability to handle most of these matters as they emerge or as it may be accused of being involved in them. 

Now there are two important points to make about how we got here. 

The first being that our current LG system is one that is embedded in colonial legacy.  Both institutionally as well as in relation to aspirations of post-colonial Zimbabwean society. 

Institutionally because we never really changed either colonial by laws for urban settlements which remain not only discriminatory toward a majority black poor but also seek to set apart as of colonial old the ‘new whites’ from the ‘new blacks’.  In other words we are scrambling over an established colonial cake that is the urban settlement and its attendant lifestyles.  Almost everyone wants to move from the rural to the ghetto urban to the envied suburbs.  This is almost like a naturalized aspiration.  Hence sometimes the inexplicable greed that we read about in the media of people getting massive properties forfeited by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC). 

The second key element of how we got here which is perhaps the most important, is that of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) at the turn of the century.  Most urban new settlements and most urban councils’, even if they do not admit to this, are beneficiaries of the same.

When it occurred the FTLRP changed land use in many areas.  What was a farm, became a residential area. What was communal land also became the equivalent of dormitory towns at the cheap. Hence for example  one can work in Harare by day and drive back to Beatrice by evening. 

So local governments are caught in a conundrum they have not yet found a solution too.   They want to collect local taxes, they want to prove their professionalism but are caught up in a web of either things they cannot control or things they willfully let play-out to their own material undemocratic advantage. 

This is were you will see that allocation of stands without the offering of title deeds, the skipping of official housing lists and the issuing out of tenders for road and other constructions such as lighting become all interlinked in what it is turning out to be alleged rings of corruption. 

What both the legacy of urban colonialism and now more recently the FTLRP then created was this perpetual phenomenon that is now with us, the ‘Land Baron’. 

With the fact of either political affiliation or being close to city council powers that be, it has been open sesame for local government to be big business for many individuals.  All you need is either an offer letter for a farm adjacent to a town or city, your party reference (ruling or opposition), change in land use approval and hey presto, you can start pegging and selling land to vulnerable families. 

You can even call them housing cooperatives. And then when things start not going well again, you can easily abandon without an iota of guilt of where you left them off, without title and without insurance. 

I must also hazard to add that when I say ‘vulnerable families’ I do not just mean the real poor in our society.  I also mean even the aspirational middle class who have been swindled out of thousands of dollars just to be told you cannot have a title deed or to be asked to destroy a house they worked so hard to build. 

What needs to be now realized is that we need to reconfigure our LG to our realities.  And democratically so.  All these allegations of corruption in local government in Zimbabwe have no singular source.  They are merely part of its systemic breakdown.  Not just based on the fact of colonial legacies where it was designed to serve a few and not a majority.  But also because in our desires to be deemed as urbanely successful we forgot to change the system to be more democratic and transparent. 

And then when the FTLRP occurred, the floodgates to land and other related corruption activities opened up.  To the extent that by the time we read about workshop expenditure scandals, we are only tipping at the iceberg of it all. 

In all of this the scramble for urban land and its privatization, the scramble to provide urban services via illicit tenders, the scramble for peri-urban land has likely made us turn a blind eye to the structural crisis of Zimbabwe’s local government. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)