WHO is really in charge at Town House? That question now hangs like a dark cloud over Harare City Council. Mayor Jacob Mafume has gone public, accusing municipal police and senior officials of actively frustrating his efforts to restore order in the capital.
When a sitting mayor says his own administration is blocking reform, it is no longer mere council bickering. It shows the crisis runs far deeper than potholes or the vendor menace on the pavements in the city.
Once hailed as the Sunshine City, Harare now groans under chronic congestion, chaotic vending and inconsistent by-law enforcement. Vendors occupy every space available, including the precincts of Town House itself.
Pirate taxis operate with impunity amid claims that some municipal police and police officers own the vehicles.
Mafume’s concerns show that the real battle is not on the streets with vendors and pirate taxis, but inside the corridors of power.
His proposal to deploy a mobile car crusher to flatten repeat offenders’ vehicles was deemed too extreme and so was his suggestion to close Leopold Takawira Street between Robert Mugabe Road and Jason Moyo Avenue to curb illegal activities around Town House.
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The question is not whether they were harsh, but whether anything can be done at all. Harare’s paralysis is now a policy in itself.
The root of the dysfunction is structural and political. The abolition of executive mayors — a political decision taken when urban councils drifted from the ruling party — stripped mayors of real power, leaving them with political visibility but little executive authority.
Town clerks and administrators gained influence, central government oversight tightened and mayors’ decisions became subject to ministerial approval.
The result: two centres of power.
On one side sits the elected mayor, facing public scrutiny and expectations, pressured to deliver results. On the other hand, an entrenched administrative machinery which answers primarily to central authorities, not the people. Add a ministry that can approve senior appointments, suspend mayors and dictate policy direction, and the chain of accountability becomes a tangled web.
The consequences fall squarely on the city’s residents. Ratepayers pay their bills faithfully, yet services falter. Enforcement is arbitrary. Illegal settlements are razed one day, allowed to stand the next day. Policy signals are contradictory, creating confusion for officials and an opportunity for the unscrupulous.
Harare’s crisis is not only about lawlessness on the streets; it is about discord at the helm. The city suffers from governance gridlock, where leadership is visible but powerless.
The solution is simple in principle but politically difficult: clarity of authority. Either restore full executive powers to mayors and hold them accountable for outcomes or openly acknowledge that operational control rests elsewhere. The current ambiguity where responsibility is visible but authority is hidden cannot continue.
Until Town House speaks with one decisive voice, vendors will continue to outmanoeuvre municipal police, pirate taxis will test weak enforcement and the city will continue its inexorable slide.
Order will not come from crushing cars or closing streets. It will come when leadership stops fighting internally and starts governing decisively.
Yet the status quo benefits Zanu PF, which has long found political capital in Harare’s dysfunction. Each burst sewer, each uncollected heap of garbage, each traffic jam becomes a convenient talking point — proof, in its telling, that the opposition cannot govern.
Residents watch with growing frustration as the city they once cherished steadily erodes.
Vendors roasting maize in the heart of the central business district are no longer a symbol of informal enterprise, but evidence that regulation has collapsed and authority is contested.
Harare needs decisive leadership, not competing centres of power, if it is to survive.
As things stand, the city will continue its slow, painful decline — becoming a cautionary tale of what happens when governance falters and authority fragments.