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Herald Reporter
Harare residents have criticised council for failure to use the new billing system, saying it is leaving room for the abuse of ratepayers’ money.

The city migrated to a new system called Sage Evolution whose developer is from South Africa early last month, following a fallout over the BIQ system.

Harare Residents Trust director Mr Precious Shumba said failure to use the new billing system could affect ratepayers.

“The City of Harare is disorganised and continues to demonstrate to the ratepayers that they are totally incompetent and unable to handle technology,” he said.

“Their failure to replace the BIQ billing system which was shut down on 21 March 2019 means that the city is unable to technologically capture their incomes and expenditures, reducing everything to manual.

“The risk is that all the money that ratepayers are paying is not getting onto the BIQ, and this implies that there is higher possibility of the criminal elements in the council to manipulate the accounts of council. At this stage, the council has no access to ratepayers’ account details except when ratepayers make payments.”

Mr Shumba said the BIQ billing system was shut down because the agents of the system in Zimbabwe allegedly raised alarm at the continued failure in the last four years by the City of Harare to produce both a trial balance and a bank reconciliation on councils’ accounts, which was threatening the maximum utilisation of underutilised fields on the BIQ platform.

Mr Shumba alleged that the delay of using the system was a deliberate move meant to protect a few debtors.

“The so-called new billing system was a mirage created to deceive ratepayers,” he said. “The truth is that the City of Harare management and a few elite councillors are busy trying to manipulate the books of accounts of the council, and the HRT believes that they want some debts owed to disappear with the BIQ.

“It is not in the best interest of ratepayers, but to protect the real big debtors who can now argue that there is no record of their debt with council since they have no access to the true account,”  he said.

Harare City Council is on record saying it retrieved all customers data that was on the BIQ system before it was shut down.

Harare mayor Councillor Herbert Gomba recently said council was making efforts to ensure that the system goes live soon, as the city’s team was still acquainting itself with the new system to avoid errors.