THE scenes from St Martins this past Friday were a harrowing echo of a past Zimbabwe promised to leave behind.
As the City of Harare’s bulldozers reduced homes to rubble, they did more than clear the alleged illegal structures; they demolished the life savings and dignity of citizens who believed they were building within the law.
This latest campaign reveals a predatory culture within the local authority.
Residents maintain they acquired these stands through the council, paid the required development fees, and proceeded with construction under the impression they were fully compliant.
It is a cruel irony: a local authority facilitates or ignores construction, accepts development fees, and then arrives with heavy machinery once the paint is dry.
This is not urban planning; it is administrative treachery.
At the heart of this chaos are the land barons — politically connected individuals who surfaced in the post-land reform era to exploit the desperate need for housing.
Recent parliamentary discussions have already highlighted deep-seated corruption within the City of Harare’s housing department, yet the burden of this misconduct is never borne by the officials or the barons. Instead, it falls on families who now sit among the ruins of their investments, while those who authorised the transactions remain untouched.
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The council’s actions suggest it has learned nothing from the scars of 2005.
Operation Murambatsvina was a humanitarian catastrophe that displaced 700 000 people, drawing international condemnation for its utter inhumanity.
United Nations special envoy Anna Tibejukiti’s report at the time strongly condemned the forced displacements, yet the same scorched-earth tactics — demolishing homes with little or no notice — are being deployed today.
By returning to these methods, the City of Harare proves that its enforcement of by-laws remains divorced from human rights and the lessons of the past.
Enforcement must be humane. If irregularities occurred, the city council must come clean about who authorised these transactions and which officials looked the other way while "illegal" suburbs rose.
We call upon the Ministry of Local Government and the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission to launch an immediate, impartial investigation into the city’s housing department.
The residents of St Martins deserve a local authority that is transparent and responsive, not one that acts as both the facilitator of questionable deals and the executioner of the resulting homes.
Until the land barons and corrupt officials are held to account, the only thing being "cleaned up" in Harare is the hope of its people.
