Community centres ready completed
THE newly constructed community centers in the five wards in Solwezi are complete and ready for commissioning, Mayor Nicholas Mukumbi has announced.
Mr Mukumbi said the initiative was aimed at bringing local government closer to the people in the wards of Solwezi districts.
He said the facilities would be used as mini civic centres where the mayor and the council management would operate from in selected days of the week.
“Councillors alike will be compelled to be meeting their electorate on a daily basis as opposed to operating from their homes,” the Mayor added.
Mr Mukumbi explained that community activities such as weddings, church functions, sports and recreation, literacy classes among others would also be held at the centres.
The centres which come along with the councillor’s office, Ward Development Committee office, Community tuck shop and a 300 capacity community hall had been constructed using locally generated funds.
THE government-controlled Zimpapers has started a massive retrenchment exercise.
Alpha Media Holdings’ Southern Eye, launched in 2013 to focus on the southern parts of the country, will stop operating on March 31, according to insiders.
“This is our last month. The paper had the potential to claim a niche market and the market was responding well, but we have been dogged by viability problems owing to a severe liquidity crunch,” said a source who declined to be named.
Some senior managers and shareholders had been opposed to the establishment of Southern Eye, which they viewed as chairman Trevor
Ncube’s personal project to serve his home area in Matabeleland at a time the media house was facing severe problems, added the source. AMH, which also publishes the Independent, The Standard and NewsDay, has been facing financial problems over the years and recently relocated from the city centre to Graniteside to reduce operational costs. It has already retrenched a sizeable number of its staff, including senior employees, but some of them are yet to receive their full terminal packages. The High Court placed AMH’s in-house printers, Strand Multiprint, under provisional liquidation due to financial problems worsened by a severe reduction in clientele.
Former AMH chief executive, Raphael Khumalo, who has since left the company, said in his High Court Application:
“Applicant is insolvent in that it is no longer able to generate any cash sufficient to settle its recurrent liabilities, particularly its obligations to employees”.
Zimpapers insiders said more than 100 employees had been retrenched after the company offered a voluntary exit package of a month’s salary for every year served.