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Herald Reporter
Housing cooperatives must use financial institutions to handle members’ contributions to avoid cases of fraud and corruption so that they fully play their part in fulfilling the Zim-Asset provisions on housing delivery.

This was said over the weekend by Zimbabwe Housing Amalgamated Association president Dr Killer Zivhu at a meeting with stakeholders in Norton where the organisation unveiled more than 2 000 serviced stands and gave a green light to its members to start building.

Dr Zivhu said the reason why the meeting with members was held amicably was because the organisation did not handle cash and has proper structures with checks and balances that ensured money was channelled to developing the stands.

“If it was another housing cooperative, this meeting could not have been held because the contributors would be after the leaders for abusing finances,” he said.

“If we want to contribute meaningfully to the Zim-Asset provisions on housing delivery, those in the housing sector must start doing business in a proper way. The cases of housing cooperative leaders always fighting with members should be a thing of the past.

“The only way to ensure things are transparent is to use the formal channels of banking the money. Housing cooperatives must not handle cash because that opens them to abusing contributors’ funds. We managed to service these stands because of our astuteness in handling the finances. We do not want to handle your cash, so we direct our members to the bank.”

The serviced stands, which are ready for occupation, are in Norton’s Galloway suburb and would be officially commissioned next month.

“We believe that because of what we have delivered, Government, under Zim-Asset should give us more land,” said Dr Zivhu. “We have the equipment, we have the engineers and we have the technology. Our only challenge is that we need more land for developing more stands in line with Zim-Asset.”

According to Zim-Asset, Government is to avail 313 368 housing units across the country by 2018 and with the available vast tracts of land across the country, the housing crisis in the country is quite surmountable.

Government recently set up an inter-ministerial technical committee to monitor the operations of housing co-operatives to ensure sound corporate governance following cases of abuse of funds by some co-operative leaders.

The then Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo emphasised that it would be ideal for housing co-operatives to conduct the development of stands through banks.