Kasukuwere denies Nyoni tiff

Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Saviour Kasukuwere yesterday said he has no tiff with Small and Medium Enterprises Cooperative Development Minister Sithembiso Nyoni on the legality of cooperatives. He said his ministry was correcting the anomalies which had resulted in people in Caledonia, Harare, losing $57 million dollars to cooperative leaders.

Appearing before the committee on Local Government, Rural and Urban Development chaired by Irene Zindi (Zanu-PF), Minister Kasukuwere said some of the corrupt activities implicated councillors and officials from his ministry.

Some of them were fingered in scams such as duplicating official stamps and allocating State land to cooperatives not approved by the ministry. Minister Kasukuwere said after having received numerous complaints on the lack of meaningful development and the misappropriation of funds in cooperatives, he engaged the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises Cooperative Development to sanitise the housing sector.

"There is no impasse between us and the ministry concerned," he said. "We sit next to each other in Cabinet. We share notes. What might be there is a misunderstanding that perhaps finds its way in the Press and the exaggeration of facts.

"For us, we want to make sure that house delivery programmes are done in a manner that does not make innocent people lose their money. As from 2009, the cooperatives faced a lot of cooperate governance issues for which we alerted our sister Ministry of SMEs. In the past 15 years, cooperatives failed to provide serviced housing delivery to the people. What existed was double allocation of stands, illegal subdivision and these affected areas such as Harare North, Harare South, Caledonia, Nyatsime and Nehanda."

Last year, it was reported that Minister Nyoni berated Minister Kasukuwere for encroaching into her portfolio by announcing a ban on housing co-operatives and said the ban was "null and void" and said they remained legal entities.

Minister Kasukuwere said most cooperative leaders had turned out to be land barons who threatened their members with eviction orders and dupe them of their hard earned cash, resulting in one cooperative leader procuring an excavator and registering it the name of his son.

Harare South, Minister Kasukuwere said, was one area which they were moving in to regulate the stands as it had became an eyesore because of the invasions by land barons.

He said the area would have turned to be the breeding place of hard core criminals, as well as diseases, as there are no proper education facilities and lack of proper ablution facilities.

Asked on why the ministry was not taking stern measures to deal with land barons, Minister Kasukuwere said: "We have denied them space to operate. We will not allocate more land to cooperatives.

"We have handed over some land barons to the police as we can not have a situation where things just get out of hand. If you have information of some people doing that, report them. We are now prepared for the challenges and certainly heads will roll."