The recent spat between Local Government minister Ignatius Chombo and the Bulawayo City Council exposes once again the arrogant and heavy hand with which the minister rules local authorities.
Editorial Comment
That is despite the fact that Chombo — as policy maker of Local Government — should concern himself with policy-making issues and not dip his fingers into the running of councils whose job should be left to chief executive officers or town clerks and mayors.
The latest tiff in Bulawayo saw Chombo declaring war on the city of Bulawayo because the city had chosen not to appoint a certain individual handpicked by the minister as a special interest councillor.
The city fathers of Bulawayo are obviously much better-placed to know individuals that are able to serve their city than Chombo can ever be and it boggles the mind why Chombo would get so irked that this particular individual was not acceptable to the people of Bulawayo.
So, in his anger, Chombo told thousands of people at a rally in Bulawayo that he was going to fight the city council by forcing them to reduce rates and tariffs.
The effects of such action would be to cripple the city; making it unable to deliver service to the people. Victims of such action are the people that ululated when Chombo made the threats.
Chombo proceeded to literally incite people to revolt against their own city. The minister called on the people to demand the immediate restoration of street lights, smooth pot-hole free roads, abundant modern market stalls and so on.
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These things collapsed when the government, led by Chombo and his colleagues in Zanu PF, superintended over an economic free-fall in the years after 2000. Since then, there is not a single city in Zimbabwe that has working street lights, smooth roads or good service delivery system. The men and women who were in charge of every facet of government when these things collapsed were Zanu PF people. The MDC was nowhere in sight.
Notwithstanding his party’s well-documented destructive tendencies, the minister unashamedly and openly declares he is going to deliberately further cripple struggling local authorities by ordering them to cut rates. This retributive behaviour will not win his party any votes.
One of his colleagues on this trip, Youth, Indigenisation and Empowerment minister Saviour Kasukuwere went further to insult the people of Bulawayo by asking why they agreed to drink water from boreholes instead of demanding to have water drawn into the city from dams and the Zambezi River!
Who does not know about Bulawayo’s water woes or when they started or why there are no significant dams there?
The sensitive issue of devolution is instructed by such issues to do with water as people of Matabeleland feel the government has neglected them by failing to invest ample resources in dam construction and in the Zambezi water project.
These are national projects not things that the Bulawayo City Council is expected to finance — lest Chombo and Kasukuwere. forget.
