Mafume and his inept city fathers are in too deep

LAST week’s story of Town House, the headquarters of the Harare City Council, being flooded by an underground stream that had found a gap in the building’s foundation is just but a metaphor that shows the city fathers are in too deep.

We are told the deluge could have destroyed the city’s most important historical documents that were kept in the basement.

This is incompetence writ large by Mayor Jacob Mafume and his posse of inept councillors.

There is a thing called “building maintenance” that could have prevented such an embarrassing predicament. Ordinarily, draining water from the basement could have saved the day, but there was one problem — Apparently, the two pumps the council usually turns to in cases of flooding were malfunctioning. The situation was reportedly so dire that the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) had to switch off power to avoid a possible disaster.

This, however, compounded the woes at Town House. And what did the city fathers do? They turned on the generator. Perhaps they think the electric shock from a power generator is innocuous compared to that delivered by ZESA. You really cannot make this up.

In trying to explain away the flub, Mafume told the world that there had been “a lot of rain” and there were “cracks in the basement”. But the real knee-slapper came next. The mayor’s solution to recover the treasure trove of historical documents that was stashed in the basement was to call some experts to “expertly remove the water”.

But wait, there was more! Mafume also revealed his profound geographical wisdom: “The whole of Harare was built on a wetland!”

It seems this groundbreaking news just hit him that very morning.

Clearly, Harare deserves better.