Mutare residents demand service delivery Clr Nhemarare
Clr Nhemarare

Clr Nhemarare

Nyore Madzianike Manicaland Bureau
Mutare residents have challenged the city council to allocate more funds to service delivery and health care services. This came up during budget consultative meetings, which started last month and ended on Monday. City of Mutare has been holding budget consultative meetings to establish areas of concern from the public on where more funds should be committed. Mutare mayor, Councillor Tatenda Nhemarare, said he was happy with the response they received from residents during the meetings.

“The budget consultative meetings ended yesterday (Monday) and we took them to every ward. The response was positive and in some wards we could have more than 100 people, whilst some wards would get between 70 and 80 people”, he said. Clr Nhemarare said residents demanded that more should be done in terms of service delivery.

“The major issues which were raised by residents related to service delivery They also spoke about health service provision and erratic water supplies in some areas. We are now going to sit down, look into the complaints and evaluate them. We will see how we are going to formulate the budget. We are now at the budget formulation stage,” he said. Clr Nhemarare said they were looking forward to increasing the budget for the forthcoming term to allow the City of Mutare to meet residents’ expectations.

“Last time we were working with a budget of about $18 million. This time we are expecting an increase,” he said. In 2016, council failed to meet the budget specifications, which prompted the Ministry of Local Government to write stressing the need to meet budgetary requirements. Your budget performance indicates that your 2015 budget was not adhered to, with some accounts performing at 42 percent and others at 185 percent,” said the ministry.

“Please, use your budget as your financial plan throughout the year and submit supplementary budgets where large diversions are experienced. You are also expected to learn from this when crafting your 2017 budget submission. The submitted performance contract for the town clerk is not aligned to the budget. This same observation was made for the 2015 budget. Please, ensure that when the new town clerk is appointed s/he has a contract that is aligned to the budget. We also expect performance management at all levels of the council.”

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