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George Maponga Masvingo Bureau
There was pandemonium at the Masvingo Civic Centre on Wednesday night after scores of residents besieged the city’s housing department offices and stayed put until late into the night demanding to be registered for interviews to be allocated 140 serviced residential stands in Mucheke suburb.

The desperate residents, the majority of them on the city’s housing waiting list, ignored pleas from senior housing officials and municipal police to leave the offices before they were registered. Council was registering residents on the housing waiting list for interviewing to assess their capacity to pay and develop the serviced stands in the city’s Mucheke D suburb.

The residents refused to budge, with some of them vowing to sleep in the corridor until they were registered. City Housing Department officials tried to address the restive stand-seekers just before 9pm in an attempt to coax them to leave, but they would have none of it, forcing the officials to work until late into the night.

Some of the residents could be heard shouting on top of their voices, vowing not to leave the offices even if it meant remaining there until the next morning. The officials were only able to leave their offices after midnight when they had cleared all those who wanted to be registered. Masvingo Town Clerk Mr Adolph Gusha yesterday downplayed the incident, saying officials in the Housing Department only closed late because they had not finished serving people who had thronged their offices.

‘’They (stand-seekers) did not refuse to vacate the offices, but were only waiting to be registered for interviews that will be held by council to choose people who will be interviewed to be allocated residential stands. I do not know whether the officials continued working late into the night, but I was made to believe they were going to close around 8pm when they expected to have registered everybody who was there,’’ he said.

Mr Gusha said council will soon conduct interviews to choose residents on the housing waiting list who will be allocated the 140 stands serviced by council in Mucheke.

‘’We allocate the stands to people on the waiting list who will have proved that they have the capacity to pay for and develop the stands,’’ he said.

Masvingo city’s housing backlog is estimated at around 15 000 and a number of residential stands have been developed over the past few years by both council and private developers, as part of a thrust to reduce homelessness. The city’s population has been rapidly growing and is now believed to have surpassed the 100 000-mark spurred by increased rural to urban migration in Masvingo province.