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Innocent Ruwende and Sallomy Matare
Harare City Council is set to conduct a skills audit of its workers to ensure it has the right workforce to achieve its goal of achieving world class city status by 2025.

In an interview after a stakeholders’ meeting at Town House yesterday, town clerk Engineer Hosiah Chisango said the city was conducting a job evaluation exercise to ensure that every job in council met the requisites of its title.

“Vision 2025 is not just a talk show,” he said.

“The first thing that we are looking at is transformation of employees to make sure that they are working in tandem with our goal. We have taken a lot of measures which include employee engagement, training and we are also doing employee evaluation to say what each job is worth and the title of each.

“After the job evaluation, we will be doing a skills audit which we look at the qualifications and the attitude of employees. In the next 18 months, we should have some results to say what kind of employees do we have? Are they the employees that can actually drive the desired goal?”

Eng Chisango said to achieve the goals, the city was working with various stakeholders and making commitments in inter-business which the business community will be holding the city accountable.

He said council was also working on the city’s procurement procedures amid concerns by stakeholders that the city could be paying more for goods and services compared to other private companies.

“We called stakeholders to tell us what they need to see,” he said.

“That one has been a major concern. Normally when we go to tender, we always find that the prices that we get are always higher than what other private entities get but when we trace it we find it is because of the time we take to make some of the payments.

“All we need to do is improve on our payment systems. We want to make sure that we automate some of those payments so that we have a paste in-paste out system where there is no human interference. We will also avoid allegations that somebody is being favoured. The best way is to make sure that we have a system that works.”

Eng Chisango said because council was not getting enough revenue, it has to juggle around to pay the city’s suppliers.

He said the city was working on improving revenue collection through decentralising revenue collections in the  districts.

One of the stakeholders who participated in the meeting, CEO Africa Round Table chairman Mr Oswell Bimha challenged the city to effectively market Harare.

“What do we want to see? We want to see a city with residents and visitors that are comfortable and happy to be in the environment. You need to create a city that has got quality standards that are comparable to none,” he  said.

“We need efficiency of services, culture of work and readily available service delivery that meets the expectation and aspirations not only of Zimbabwe but of a business sector that bring the much needed revenue to the  city.

“As far as these departments are concerned, they should work around the clock in order to achieve Vision 2025.”