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Innocent Ruwende Municipal Reporter
Harare City Council has not serviced land for residential stands for the past 20 years, citing economic hardships, leaving the door open for the mushrooming of illegal settlements as unscrupulous land barons stepped in to exploit a growing housing backlog, acting town clerk Mrs Josephine Ncube has admitted.

MDC-T-dominated councils have been running the city for 16 of the 20 years. Mrs Ncube recently told the education, health, housing and community services and licensing committee that the city would create a land value addition team led by a town planner to service land for residential stands in Harare.

According to recent minutes of the committee, Mrs Ncube reported that for more than 20 years council had abrogated its mandate to service land due to economic challenges and, technically ceding that duty to housing cooperatives.

“While the housing cooperatives and pay schemes had been delivering serviced stands and houses, this had been taking too long. Most of these projects remained either undeveloped or partially serviced with beneficiaries staying in unplanned temporary structures,” read the minutes.

“The major challenges identified had been attributed to lack of resources for land processes to the extent that land seekers had to finance the processes. This caused a meltdown of the procedures across council, which brought the unscrupulous land barons and land invasions,” reads part of the minutes.

She said the proposed land value addition team would streamline the land delivery chain in a transparent manner and ensure coordination across council departments.

The terms of reference for the land value addition team include town planning design and base mapping, land surveying, engineering designs approvals, project costing, project land valuation, to produce project documentation on a project by project basis and Gantt charts for every project undertaken.

Mrs Ncube said funding would come from pay schemes and that the team would facilitate the flow of money from beneficiaries into the Estates Account, which would be used for the various land servicing processes.

She said city would also manage ring-fenced estate accounts with banks which have the capacity to lend the money to council for land and infrastructural developments. Mrs Ncube said the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was also an additional option for availing funding as it had set aside funds through Homelink (Private) Limited.

“The Government had advised council that Homelink had been provided with funding to provide low and medium cost housing to locals and diaspora clients. The ring fenced estate account would form a revolving fund servicing land. Servicing would start with a project in St Martin’s and Southerton,” reads part of he minutes.

Mrs Ncube said once the stands were serviced, the housing department would select applicants who qualify for particular housing schemes from the city’s housing waiting list. She said allocations would be made to both individual applicants as well as cooperatives.

Recently Harare City announced that it was demolishing illegal structures in 19 sites where land barons had taken advantage of the local authority’s failure to plan to provide stands to residents. So far over 50 land barons have appeared in court for selling Government and council land to unsuspecting home-seekers.