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Patrick Chitumba Midlands Bureau Chief
Councillors in rural or urban councils should put service delivery ahead of receiving allowances or amassing ill-gotten wealth from their councils, Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister July Moyo has said.

He was speaking at the councillors induction workshop in Gweru on Monday.

“Councillors should put service delivery first ahead of receiving allowances and amassing ill-gotten wealth from their councils. Service delivery first,” he said. “Allowances are not conditions of service. You should know that as ministers we even get less allowance than yours when we go out on duty.

“However, you can work on the issue yourselves, but do not inflate the figures, you can sit down and regulate on the adjustment of the allowance as individual councils. You are the ones who can amend the by-laws.”

Gweru City Council Ward 2 Councillor Hamutendi Kombayi said the $10 allowances that they are getting from the local authority was little and affecting council operations and service delivery.

“Our $10 dollar allowance, which we get when doing council business pains us because it’s very little,” he said. “And we cannot do much with it; it’s unfair on our side considering what the drivers are getting when going out yet we are the ones who are doing more council work which demands a lot when we enter in the field.”

Tongogara Rural District Councillor Wilbert Garapasi said councillors, especially those in rural areas, were the most hard done by the current allowances since they travel long distances to conduct council business.

“We travel more than 40km to do our council duties in the rural areas where we are based and some of us even use bicycles to reach to the people yet we are the councillors who were chosen to stand for the people,” he said.

“It gives a negative impression to the people we serve when we don’t attend to their grievances in time because we don’t even have cars we are poor.”

The induction workshop, which was aimed at conscientising councillors on how to conduct their duties properly for the development of the councils, was attended by councillors, chairpersons of RDCs, mayors, town clerks and district administrators from the Midlands Province.