Harare City Council has said they are not receiving enough money from the Zimbabwe National Roads Administration (Zinara) to maintain city roads whose condition continues to deteriorate.
BY MUNESU NYAKUDYA
Council spokesperson Michael Chideme made the remarks while speaking at a workshop organised by the Development Reality Institute (DRI) in Harare yesterday.
“The argument that the local authorities have, Harare included, is that we should get back the responsibility of collecting vehicle licence fees, which forms the bulk of the money that used to be invested in the road network,” Chideme said.
“The city is not getting the money from Zinara, they sit in their board meetings and decide how much can be given to Harare.
“Sometimes they make a budget, but it won’t be released at once; it comes in drips and drops. Sometimes they say they are releasing money for drain clearance, we then clear the drains and fail to attend to the potholes.”
Chideme urged stakeholders to lobby so that councils collect licence fees for maintenance of roads.
“We think that there is a lot of money from tollgates so the tollgates funds should go to the main roads, but the moneys for cars in Harare should actually work in Harare.
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“There are also other people who have never driven outside Harare, but their moneys are being used to develop somewhere,” Chideme added.
Meanwhile, DRI programmes coordinator O’Brien Makore said they had developed a mobile application that allows young people to interface with the local authorities.
“The Harare young mobile application is an application integrated on various digital platforms like Facebook, twitter and texts. Residents can also download the application on Google Play Store and there are also plans that it may be available on the App Store.
“The application enables residents to interface with the local authorities in time and also reporting in service delivery and also monitoring how the city council is utilising their rates so that at the end of the day there is improved service,” he said.
Chideme said they were happy with the mobile application as they could now easily get people’s views on the services provided by the city.
Vehicle licence fees were in the past collected by local authorities until 2010 when Zinara took over, and since last year the council has been appealing for a change of policy to allow it to collect the fees or alternatively to ensure that there is equitable distribution of vehicle licensing funds.
