THERE is a particular kind of discomfort that comes from watching a leader explain away a failure with the cheerfulness of someone announcing a victory.
When Harare mayor Jacob Mafume recently sat down with NewZimbabwe.com to account for why the capital city missed its widely publicised 2025 world-class city target, he offered what many residents would rightly describe as a masterclass in deflection dressed up as progress.
Rather than offer a frank reckoning with the catastrophic state of Zimbabwe’s capital, the mayor reached for optimism, told us the city has the “DNA of a world-class city” and proceeded to point to Joina City and a few gleaming road junctions as proof that Harare is essentially already there. It is the kind of statement that would be laughable if the situation were not so desperately serious. To be fair to the mayor, he did acknowledge that the 2025 target was not originally his.
He explained that it was ”the vision of the then mayors in 2010”, which his council adopted and sought to carry forward. That is a reasonable clarification. But it does not excuse the fact that under his own watch, the city has continued to deteriorate at a pace that makes the 2025 promise seem not merely ambitious, but frankly absurd.
Shifting the origin of the promise to a previous generation of mayors does not shift the responsibility for delivery. If anything, it deepens the concern, because it tells us that Harare has now spent 15 years promising its residents a world-class city, while delivering something that increasingly resembles the opposite.
Let us begin with the most basic of a city’s responsibilities — sanitation. A capital city is, among many things, the physical face a country presents to the world. It is where visitors arrive, where business is conducted, where diplomats walk the streets, where first impressions are formed and where national pride is either affirmed or quietly embarrassed.
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Walk through Harare’s central business district (CBD) today, and the smell alone will tell you everything you need to know about the state of affairs. There are stretches of the city centre where the stench is so overwhelming that it hangs in the air like a permanent feature of the urban landscape. This is not a recent development. It has been building for years, the product of a sewerage system that is ageing, under-maintained, and repeatedly patched with temporary fixes that never address the underlying collapse.
When a foreign visitor steps off a flight at what the mayor describes as a “perfectly world-class airport” and then takes a drive into the city centre, what greets them is not a sunshine city — it is the smell of a city in decay.
The state of Harare’s sewer infrastructure is nothing short of a public health emergency. Raw sewage routinely bursts from manholes in residential areas and commercial streets alike, running along pavements and gutters, contaminating water sources and breeding the conditions for cholera and typhoid outbreaks that should, by this point in the country’s history, be entirely preventable. These are diseases of the 19th century. They are diseases that responsible urban governance eliminated in most of the world over a hundred years ago. The mayor speaks of doing “the software” — of delivering world-class water and electricity. But you cannot speak of software when the hardware is in ruins. You cannot promise world-class service delivery when the pipes beneath the city are collapsing.
Water itself is a crisis that has become so normalised that many Harare residents no longer frame it as an emergency — they have simply reorganised their lives around its absence. In suburb after suburb, taps run dry for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Families rely on boreholes, water tanks and vendors who sell water at prices that make a mockery of the idea that access to clean water is a basic right.
Garbage collection or more precisely the near-total collapse thereof, is another daily indignity that Harare’s residents have been forced to absorb. In many suburbs, refuse goes uncollected for weeks. Mountains of waste accumulate on street corners, in open spaces and along drainage channels. When the rains come, as they do every season, that waste is swept into streams, into low-lying areas and into the very water sources that communities depend on. Flies breed in the piles. Rats multiply. Children play near waste dumps because there are no parks, no clean open spaces, no alternatives. The high-density areas — Mbare, Highfield, Dzivarasekwa, Glen Norah, Budiriro — bear the worst of this neglect. These are the suburbs where the majority of Harare’s residents live and work, and they have been systematically deprived of the most basic municipal services. Mafume speaks of cluster homes and new shopping centres as evidence that the city is beginning to “look and feel like any international city”. But cluster homes in Borrowdale and Greenfields do not clean the gutters of Mbare.
The widening gap between the well-maintained northern suburbs and the neglected high-density areas of the south and west is perhaps the most morally troubling dimension of Harare’s decay.
Areas such as Madokero Mall, Borrowdale Village Walk and Highlands Park are clean, green, modern and functional. They could plausibly be described as approaching an international standard. But they represent a tiny fraction of Harare's geography and an even tinier fraction of its population. The majority of this city's residents do not live in Borrowdale. They live in Budiriro, in Kuwadzana, in Epworth, in Glen View — and in those places, the roads are broken, the lights are out, the water does not flow and council's presence is felt mainly through the arrival of municipal police seeking to confiscate the goods of vendors trying to survive. It is a profound injustice to hold up the prosperity of a few upmarket enclaves as evidence of citywide progress. It is, frankly, dishonest.
The question of urban housing planning cannot be avoided in any honest assessment of Harare's governance failures. The recent demolitions in Whitecliff and Stoneridge have brought into sharp relief a crisis that has been building for decades. Thousands of families in those areas had constructed homes on stands that they purchased, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, only to discover too late that those stands had been allocated illegally, that they sat on wetlands, on under-prepared land or on plots whose ownership was disputed or fraudulent. The demolitions were conducted in a manner widely described as inhumane — families were given inadequate notice, their homes were brought down without proper support structures in place and children and elderly residents were left exposed to the elements. Whatever the legal justification for the demolitions, the manner in which they were carried out speaks to an institutional contempt for the dignity of poor urban residents that is difficult to defend.
But the deeper scandal is not the demolitions themselves — it is the system that made them necessary. Urban land in Harare has for years been controlled and distributed through networks of so-called land barons who operate with apparent impunity, allocating stands illegally, collecting money from desperate families who want nothing more than a piece of ground on which to build a home and leaving those families exposed to the full force of the law when the fraud eventually unravels. This could not have happened at the scale it has happened without the active involvement or the wilful negligence of those within the system of local governance.
Stands do not end up on wetlands by accident. They are surveyed, marketed, sold and built upon over the years, often in plain sight. The council knew or should have known. The relevant authorities knew or should have known. And yet the people who bear the cost are always the same people — the families who saved for years, who built their modest homes brick by brick and who now find themselves with nothing. This is not a planning failure. It is a governance failure with a human face, and it demands accountability that has, so far, not been forthcoming.
Infrastructure decay extends beyond the domestic sphere into the realm of public amenities that define a city's civic identity. The National Sports Stadium and Rufaro Stadium, both of which have undergone renovation works in recent times, stand as symbols of an approach to public investment that prioritises appearances over substance. Reports and direct observation suggest that the renovations have not met the standard that was promised, that finishing quality is poor and that the facilities do not reflect the level of investment that was purportedly made. For a country that takes pride in its sporting traditions, that treats its national stadium as a place of collective identity and celebration, this is a particular disappointment. Stadiums are not merely infrastructure — they are expressions of what a society values and what it is capable of building. When the renovation of a national stadium falls below standard, it tells a story about institutional capacity, about oversight, about accountability for public funds. That story is not a flattering one.
The treatment of informal traders in Harare’s CBD deserves its own frank examination. Municipal police have for years conducted what can only be described as a campaign of harassment against vendors — men and women who sell vegetables, airtime, clothing, and food in the city centre, not because they prefer informality, but because the formal economy has failed to absorb them. These are people who wake up before dawn, travel long distances, and stand for hours under the sun or in the rain to sell goods that allow their families to eat. Council's response to their presence has been to send teams of municipal police who confiscate their goods, chase them through the streets and in some cases destroy their stock. This is not urban management. It is the persecution of the poor. It solves nothing — the vendors return the next day, because they have no alternative — and it causes immense harm to the livelihoods and dignity of people who are already among the city's most vulnerable residents. If council genuinely wants to address the issue of informal trading in CBD, there are more humane, more effective and more dignified ways to do it than destroying the goods of people who are simply trying to survive.
Vehicle clamping in Harare's CBD has similarly become an exercise that many residents regard less as law enforcement and more as revenue extraction. The manner in which clamping is carried out is frequently reported to be irregular, sometimes in violation of regulations that govern city parking and almost always designed to extract the maximum possible payment from motorists rather than to genuinely manage traffic flow or parking availability. Meanwhile, the volume of vehicles in the CBD has grown dramatically as the population has expanded and as public transport has deteriorated, forcing more people to rely on private vehicles. The solution to this challenge is not more aggressive clamping — it is better planning. It requires investment in public transport, the development of off-street parking facilities, the redesign of key CBD intersections and a parking management system that is transparent, fair, and genuinely oriented towards the public good rather than council's revenue targets.
What, then, must be done? The answer begins with honesty — a quality that has been conspicuously absent from the public discourse around Harare's development. Council must stop measuring progress by the number of new private buildings that have gone up under its watch and start measuring it by the quality of services it actually delivers to all of its residents, including and especially those who live in the high-density areas that have been neglected for decades. The billing system must be overhauled completely, with a genuine commitment to accuracy, transparency and fairness, so that residents who receive no water are not billed for water, and so that council can collect revenue from those who genuinely owe it. The sewage and water reticulation infrastructure must be treated as the emergency it is — not as a long-term aspiration to be addressed when resources allow, but as an immediate public health crisis requiring urgent and sustained intervention. Partnerships with national government, development finance institutions and international organisations should be pursued aggressively to fund the rehabilitation of infrastructure that council cannot fix alone.
Urban housing planning must be radically reformed. The culture of illegal land allocation must be confronted directly, with prosecutions that reach the barons and the officials who enable them, not just the families who are their victims. The master plan must be activated, funded and enforced. Informal settlements must be upgraded rather than demolished wherever possible, recognising that the people who live in them are not squatters but citizens who have been failed by a system that could not provide them with legal, affordable housing in time. The treatment of vendors must shift from harassment to integration — the city needs a properly resourced, properly managed network of vending facilities that vendors actually want to use, that are clean, safe and fairly administered. The municipal police must be retrained and held accountable for the manner in which they interact with the public, with zero tolerance for the confiscation and destruction of goods that represent nothing less than the theft of poor people's livelihoods.
Other players must also step up. The national government cannot wash its hands of Harare's decay and point to devolution as an excuse for non-intervention when the scale of the crisis is this large. Development partners, the private sector, civil society organisations and community-based structures all have roles to play in the rehabilitation of this city. Harare's residents themselves — through ward committees, residents’ associations, and organised civic pressure — must continue to hold their council accountable, to demand transparency, to attend public meetings and to reject the culture of partisan loyalty that has too often allowed poor governance to escape the scrutiny it deserves.
Mafume says the city is "closer to being world-class than we were 20 years ago" and that he is "satisfied" with the direction of travel. With the greatest of respect to the mayor, satisfaction is a privilege that belongs to those who do not walk through the stench of the CBD every morning, who do not live with burst sewage running past their gates, who do not carry water from a borehole because the tap has been dry for three weeks and who do not watch their homes being demolished because a land baron sold them a fraudulent stand. The residents of Harare are not satisfied. They are tired — tired of promises, tired of deflection, tired of being told that progress is happening when their daily experience tells a different story entirely. The Sunshine City is not a matter of DNA. It is a matter of delivery. And delivery requires not optimism alone, but courage, accountability, competence and the political will to serve all of the city's people — not just those who live in its northern suburbs. Until the day that standard is met, the Sunshine City remains what it has always been: a promise.