D-Day for Gimboki housing project

AT LEAST 7 000 families that are set to benefit from the Gimboki South housing project will know their fate Friday as council hands down results of an arbitration process which sought to realign the housing project that is riddled by massive corruption and abuse of funds.

The project, which was started in July 2007, has been stalled over the years due to a litany of reasons.

Mutare City Council, through the town clerk's office, intervened some months back to resolve ending disputes between members of the Mutare Housing Consortium who were deliberately throwing spanners in the works.

A private developer, Dreamos, hired to develop the stands after the consortium failed to do so, has also been badly affected by the unending disputes that have resulted in some members of the consortium bulldozing their way into the project.

Town clerk Mr Obert Muzawazi revealed on Wednesday that he had finished the arbitration process and the results were ready.

"I have finished the arbitration process and the results are ready to be read to the beneficiaries. To this end I am inviting the beneficiaries to come and hear it for themselves on Saturday at the site. What we are going to say will provide the guidelines that should be followed in implementing the project.

"We need to reassert the role of the consortium because it has a binding contract with council insofar as the servicing of the stands is concerned. If the consortium fails to deliver as per our agreement, then council will repossess the project and deliver the stands to the beneficiaries. It is our hope that people will sober up and come to their senses. We no longer want scenarios where some members of the consortium deliberately frustrate progress because they want to cash in on the confusion.

"Beneficiaries must also be informed that they may be asked to pay more money because what they paid in the past through their various groups was either stolen or misused. In the interest of seeing the project through, the beneficiaries must pay up and claim the missing funds from the people who handled the funds," he said.

Problems facing the project mainly result from millions of dollars paid by some beneficiaries to the Energy Mutodi-owned National Housing Development Trust.

That money was supposed to be handed to the consortium for development purposes, but that was not so.

Currently NHDT is facing fraud charges at the criminal courts from beneficiaries who are demanding their money back.

Things got more complicated recently after the NHDT bulldozed its way into the housing project, affecting the operations of Dreamos.

As a result, Dreamos filed an urgent chamber application at the High Court in Harare asking the courts to evict NHDT from the project.

They were granted the order by Judge Happious Zhou, who ordered NHDT off the site.

In the application Mutodi and his National Housing Delivery Trust, trading as Zimbabwe Trust Housing Finance and Gift Chaya, were cited as respondents.

"The respondents be and are hereby ordered to restore peaceful and undisturbed occupation of Gimboki South Dangamvura, Mutare, to the applicant."

The court ordered Mutodi to stop all excavation, construction and development work on the site as well as ordering NHDT employees to leave the premises and to stop interfering with Dreamos Investments' work.

Dreamos managing director Emmanuel Musevenzo sought the re-instatement of his company as the custodians of the project after Mutodi took over.

Musevenzo told the court that in September last year, his company entered into a housing development contract with Mutare Housing Consortium.

In terms of the agreement Dreamos was contracted to procure funding and co-administer the housing project. It was also entrusted with the overall control of the project, including all construction work.