Harare City Council owed $615 million

OVER half of Harare residents are not paying their bills while Government and business are also defaulting, a situation that has seen council being owed over $615 million.

Acting finance director Mr Tendai Kwenda said Harare collects between 45 and 50 percent of what it bills residents. He said the situation was now unsustainable.

“It is sad to note that our debtor’s book is growing every month. The last time we reported we were on about $600 million. We are currently on $615 million. Where we are billing an average of $24 million a month. Our collection rate is about 45 to 50 percent,” he said.

“What it means is that half of the people in Harare are not meeting their obligations to council and the same half still expects council to provide services, I do not know how. We have people who have not bothered to pay a single penny since the debt write off that was in June 2013 and we are in 2017.”

He urged residents to make an effort to settle their bills to enable council to provide basic services.

Mr Kwenda said council has an elaborate debt management system and does not handover residents to debtors without engaging them first.

“We just do not hand over people to debt collectors and lawyers. Our debt management system is quite elaborate. We remind people to pay their arrears and we also send people a second reminder and a final demand,” he said.

“We invite you to discuss so we can agree on a payment plan but if all those efforts fail, we obviously have to revert to the legal processes. We start with the summons, warrants, then we handover cases of more than $10 000 and quite recently we gave to debt collectors.”

Mr Kwenda said the city’s debt collectors were effective.

He dismissed claims that council had indiscriminately unleashed debt collectors.

“We just said collect from everyone. The debt collectors are complementing our efforts,” he said.

Last year council served about 20 000 defaulters with summons to attach properties, as it moved to recover money owed in unpaid bills by residents.

The summons were served to residents in Borrowdale, Mabvuku, Mt Pleasant, Highlands, Mabelreign, Marlborough and other suburbs.

Council is failing to provide basic services like provision of potable water, garbage collection and road maintenance. The situation is bad in suburbs with residents are dumping litter on open spaces.

There are potholes on roads making life difficult for motorists.

Some residents are now sourcing water from unprotected wells risking waterborne diseases.