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THE rot at Chitungwiza Municipality has reached levels that now require serious intervention. The services of a turnaround strategist are now needed at the municipality that has been dogged by corruption allegations and mismanagement for years on end.

Residents on Monday demonstrated at the municipality head office demanding the ouster of town clerk, Mr George Makunde and his management for alleged gross incompetence.

This followed the recent attachment of council property after the municipality failed to service its debts, including US$4,2 million owed to Nissam Private Limited it had hired to design and layout residential stands at Nyatsime Township.

The attached assets included refuse collection trucks, graders, office furniture, computers, vehicles among others, grounding service in the dormitory town.

That the residents demonstrated against Chitungwiza Municipality’s management is hardly surprising as they have had enough of the bungling by the municipality where the top management seem concerned with fattening their pockets at the expense of service delivery.

Cases of fraud and criminal abuse of duty as public officers involving senior management at the municipality are well documented and we believe now is the time to put an end to all this and allow Chitungwiza Municipality to grow.

It has remained stunted because the people thrust in positions of authority do not care about its growth, but their own selfish interests.

We cannot continue to cry over the goings on at the municipality when the Government can intervene and restore sanity. We agree the Government has intervened many times now by appointing commissions to run the municipality, but sadly some of the commissions have ended up entangled in the looting.

We expect the Government to appoint people with turnaround background; people who can bring new ways of doing business at the municipality.

Anyone who takes up office at the municipality should have a pronounced history of turnaround and such people are many in this country.

The municipality is no place for people who blame their incompetence on historical issues. We know that predecessors messed up council operations, but that should not be an excuse for bad performance by the current management.

The situation presents an opportunity for management to show us its astuteness in turning around the fortunes of the municipality instead of blaming their poor performance on historical issues.

Government needs to thrust people who are able to come up with business models that generate revenue to allow them to provide the much-needed services to residents. We want to see a management that has a third eye to identify opportunities for making money to boost council coffers. It is no place for cry-babies.

We cannot have a municipality that is always in the news for bad reasons; a council that seems never to do anything right, no matter how much we change management and appoint commissions.

What management, in this day, would have 800 workers out of the 1 134 in its employ without a full Ordinary level certificate?