Reports of thieving politicians parcelling out residential stands in urban and peri-urban areas around Harare in a haphazard and unlawful manner are frightfully disturbing.
Report by Tangai Chipangura
What immediately comes to mind is the disaster that Epworth became because of this manner of doing things. The local authority in that area, the Epworth Local Board, has failed to bring order to the chaos in this settlement where people have, over decades, been allowed to put up houses wherever they wanted.
Some of the disorderly settlements in Epworth go by such names as Gada 1, Gada 2 etcetera — Gada being a vernacular derivative of an expression of “sitting wherever one wishes”. The result of this willy-nilly human settlement has been that when the local authority sought to bring some semblance of order in Epworth, the task became impossible. There were houses constructed where roads were supposed to run through, where sewer lines should be or where electricity poles ought to be erected.
The settlement of Epworth has, because of this disorderly lawlessness, remained largely undeveloped — a place where residents do not have formal residential addresses — just as they do not have modern sewer systems or water reticulation or roads or electricity.
Regardless of its close proximity to the capital city, Epworth has become the epicentre of disease outbreaks, a haven of criminals and a place associated with every anti-social activity one can think of.
This is what happens when human settlements are allowed to sprout without control or order. This is the curse that now threatens Harare and Chitungwiza if the ongoing madness is allowed to continue.
Suspected Zanu PF supporters are reportedly being rewarded with residential stands at every open space in the two cities by unscrupulous party officials who may have promised the people the properties in the run-up to the July 31 elections, but are also taking money from these desperate home seekers.
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In the case of Chitungwiza, a Zanu PF councillor-elect who is personally known to have amassed close to half the city’s land through hook and crook, is said to be leading the latest land grab by party supporters. Soon after elections, almost all open spaces, including wetlands, were swarmed by party supporters sporting party regalia. They are digging up the areas and building structures in a haphazard manner.
This newly-elected Zanu PF councillor is pocketing thousands of dollars taken from these unsuspecting home seekers who may very soon find themselves without these stands when the law eventually takes its course.
The monstrosity is obtaining, according to reports, at open spaces in the town’s Unit A, Unit C, Unit K, Unit J, Unit L, Unit O, Zengeza and St Mary’s sections.
Officials at the council’s engineering and planning departments recently said of the invasions: “We are aware this is happening, but we are not involved.”
What this seems to imply is that the local authority has no power to stop these politically-motivated land invasions happening under its nose and endangering the town and its over 2 million residents.
There is absolutely nothing wrong in homeless people getting land, but there is everything wrong if certain crooks seek to transform an orderly settlement into slums while ripping poor home seekers of their hard-earned cash.
Local authorities have provisions for the expansion of their boundaries to accommodate their growing populations and politicians who themselves do not live anywhere near the shantytowns that they seek to create, should be decent enough to observe the law and take the correct, orderly and lawful routes to provide land to their supporters.
It would be shameful for any self-respecting political organisation to be seen to be associated with this kind of primitive madness.
Zanu PF secretary for administration Didymus Mutasa has correctly distanced the party from this madness. In remarks suggesting the party is aware of this scandal, Mutasa said the party was out to stop the madness.
“It’s false (that Zanu PF is authorising these invasions), absolutely false. If anything, we are stopping it. There are people doing it purporting to be Zanu PF. Zanu PF does not do anything silly and corrupt like that,” Mutasa said.
With such categoric denial of responsibility by the party’s administration chief, it then becomes imperative that those doing these land thieves are exposed and stopped before they turn Harare and Chitungwiza into that disaster called Epworth.
Local authorities should be emboldened by the party leadership’s position disowning this madness and move to stop it. Individuals like this guy in Chitungwiza cannot be allowed to abuse residents of this big city because of greed and his penchant for arrogance and sickening impunity that seems to make him believe he owns the town and everybody in it.
What this corrupt individual is doing is criminal and Zanu PF should rein him in or, better still, kick him out before he stains the party permanently. The law too should not sit and watch while plunderers who belong in jail run amok, ruining the lives of innocent residents! [email protected]
