NewsDay interviewed outgoing Harare Mayor in the last week of August 2013. Outgoing Mayor Muchadeyi Masunda and his team at Town House, as did their Bulawayo and Mutare counterparts, had done a splendid job of picking up the devastated cities in mid 2008 and setting in motion the task of restoring services to their residents. The United Nations Children’s Fund, the International Rescue Committee, other United Nations agencies, and even other cities and private philanthropists provided funding and some administrative assistance.
Tapiwa Nyandoro
The cities’ shattered industries also started to produce goods. Few, however, never opened their doors. Others limped on for a while before succumbing to high interest rates or their emaciated balance sheets, thanks to the ravages of hyperinflation. Many will never rise again in the near future as the global environment and marketplace has changed. So the mayors of the cities have to be adept at passing the hat around locally and international, literally moving from “crisis to crisis” This of course is not the way to go; strategies to grow revenues are needed.
Besides dollarisation wiping out all cash holdings on most individuals and corporate balance sheets, unemployment and under unemployment have become the cities’ major threats. That is of course apart from the central government whose misguided, but sometimes well meaning polices have stripped the cities of their major revenue streams. Electricity surcharges that benefited the cities had been lost when the cities’ electrical departments were incorporated into Zesa. The cities’ water departments also disappeared into a new deficiently capitalised, manned and resourced parastatal Zimbabwe National Water Authority, with disastrous outcomes. Government grants that helped fund other cities elsewhere had dried up. All that remained was taxation. The efficiency that should come with urbanisation was thus being milked to buy votes elsewhere. It was termed equitable distribution of tax revenues, but it was killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Mayors and their urban councils should thus be seized with strategies to attract investment and grow formal employment in town and also reclaim revenue lost to central government and its inefficient parastatals over the years, if they ever hope to get rid of the begging bowls and non-performing debtors. Cities cannot squeeze rates from the unemployed, the under-employed and the poorly paid. Selected industries must be resuscitated. Most cannot. As the AfDB says, they are not creditworthy. The balance sheets are too far gone while some revival plans are not viable. But new ones can be added to a city’s economy, especially in the service sector, where the huge pool of quality manpower could be a comparative advantage.
But first the enabling infrastructure must be in place. Getting reliable supplies of water and energy is an urgent prerequisite. The mayors need to get involved in the mobilisation of private capital for electricity generation and water provision. The Kunzvi Dam and the Zambezi water pipeline are long overdue.
World class infrastructure for Information handling and Communication Technology (ICT) must be installed. This calls for huge capital investment, the bulk of which will have to be off shore sourced. Bankable projects in hand the Mayors of Harare and Bulawayo need to sell their cities to potential investors, capital providers and technical partners. Assuming this infrastructure rehabilitation and expansion phase is put in motion, then the services and manufacturing industry could take off simultaneously.
Progress would be further enhanced if central government were to enact a law, the “Economy Recovery Act” that would give both central and local government, wide powers to restructure the public service and State-owned organisations so that key, if not all posts are occupied by competent officials with the requisite integrity and experience. The Act would allow a quick review of human resource issues to ensure institutional capacity does not hinder the economy recovery agenda.
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Capacity building is important as events across the Limpopo have shown that most South African towns and even some ministries fail to use government grants and votes due to incompetence of some key public service employees. Thus a much leaner, well-experienced, action-focused and adequately compensated bureaucracy is essential for economic recovery at both central and local government levels. At the same time councils and Parliament must appreciate that their most important task is passing budgets, and thereafter closely monitoring its application. Councils in particular must desist from acting as executive managers and stick to their oversight function.
Once the ICT infrastructure is in place, one service industry that could and should be openly courted by city governments is business process outsourcing or the so called Call-centre business, or off site back office.
Employees of these centres attend to virtually any major business’ internal and external customers who may be oceans and continents away thanks to the internet. Offering such services 24/7 to the rich English speaking world could create thousands of jobs for Zimbabweans. The Philippines and India are the major providers of these services to the English speaking world.
According to The Economist, of June 23rd, 2012, “The rise of what is known as business process outsourcing (BPO) in the Philippines has been nothing short of phenomenal”.
Since introduction in 1997 the sector now employs over six hundred thousand employees in the Philippines, with revenues exceeding $11 billion, virtually the size of Zimbabwe’s current economy! Zimbabwe can follow suit as Rwanda and Kenya are doing. But first we have to get the sanctions of our backs by any means possible.
The stakes are that high.
