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Minister Chinamasa

Herald Reporter
Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa, has rapped the MDC-T-dominated urban councils for employing incompetent people who are failing to run councils and relying on land sales as the main source of revenue.

Addressing delegates at the Local Government Investment Conference on Monday, Minister Chinamasa said local authorities’ financial positions were weak, making it difficult for them to attract investment.

“Another challenge is that local authorities have limited capacity to effectively manage finances. You must appoint appropriate people with appropriate qualifications to run your finances, to run your human resources department and engineering services,” he said.

“It is very critical and I hope that the Public Entities Corporate Governance Bill is addressing all those issues. The employment costs themselves are unsustainable. I am happy Government issued out a directive of 70:30 percent threshold for service delivery and employment costs respectively and there are already some councils which are compliant.”

Minister Chinamasa said if councils did not follow the directive their finances would never be right. He said low levels of spending on operations and maintenance were leading to a decline in service delivery.

“Local authorities should be smart to attract investors. Heavy reliance on the sale of assets including land as the main source of revenue is not attainable,” he said.

“Land is a finite resource when it depletes where would be your source of money. Local authority’s financial positions are very weak. This is an unpleasant position that makes it difficult for your local authorities to attract investment, raise credit or even collect rates from the public.”

He said there were some local authorities that did not know the number of housing units in their locality and had no data bases. Minister Chinamasa questioned how such councils expected to collect refuse fees and rates if they did not know their housing portfolio.

“A lot of housing development taking place in all our cities is being done through cash payments no mortgages which suggest that the people have money and local authorities should put their houses in order to be able to tap into that resource,” he said.

“We expect as Government an orderly delivery of the services by the local authorities. We will as Government not tolerate any chaos or confusions that are deliberately caused by officials who would want to benefit themselves or their associates.”

He said disorderly housing did not take into account the environmental factors adding that councils should uphold Government’s zero tolerance stance on land barons.