Holistic approach needed to address rot in councils

OUR Parliament and the Executive have a duty to create an enabling environment to facilitate the functionality of our local authorities. However, each must take full responsibility in performing its duties and responsibilities.

When citizens vote for councillors and Members of Parliament, they do not surrender their rights.

However, Zimbabwean laws suggest clearly that once citizens cast their votes, the rest is left to political parties, individual MPs and councillors to do as they please.

They consult each other and agree on issues that perpetuate the marginalisation of voters to such an extent that they are excluded in decision-making processes and policy-making.

Voting has become a process of putting people in positions of accessing public resources — land, houses and funds.

Every councillor, mayor and chairperson in the 32 urban local authorities and 60 rural local authorities is aware that the Urban Councils Act and the Constitution do not confer them with executive authority to enforce and implement their decisions and resolutions.

Instead, the town clerks, secretaries, chief executives and line managers are bestowed with full executive authority to implement council resolutions.

These officials report to the Local Government ministry, thus making them largely unaccountable for service provision in local authorities.

The Urban Councils Act further empowers the councillors and other policymakers to direct and guide the executives on policy implementation.

Councillors work through standing committees and the full councils to suspend and fire incompetent and corrupt executives, including the accounting officers.

Their only major challenge remains that the finalisation of the labour matters rests with the Local Government Board, which the Local Government ministry should put in place to enable local authorities to finalise their recruitment and dismissal of senior council workers.

Junior council workers can be dealt with without the involvement of the Local Government Board.

Senior council executives constitute between 5% to 10% of the total council workforce.

This means the councillors and their respective committees can finalise the disciplinary matters for the majority of the workers without worrying about central government.

The question is why are councillors not dealing with the identified problem workers who daily do nothing and yet want full salaries and allowances.

In other words, councillors are partly to blame for the rot in their areas of jurisdiction.

Let us address all service delivery challenges in a holistic manner and avoid narrow interventions.

The key challenges affecting councils are emanating from the local authorities.

There is deep-seated corruption and manipulation of systems to hoodwink the public.