Investigate Corrupt Councillors to Flash-out Bad Apples

The recent call by the Bulawayo residents for the lifestyle audits of councillors in the city, amid concerns that the officials are abusing their positions to accumulate wealth, and properties is a welcome development which should be implemented urgently in all towns and cities in Zimbabwe.

Some councillors have become hardcore criminals that are infamous for concentrating on amassing personal wealth at the expense of ensuring efficient service delivery for the good of the generality of the municipal populace.

The councillors are elected by the local communities for them to form a municipal council which caters for their community welfare. This has proved to the contrary with some councillors bent on enhancing their selfish personal aggrandisement using council facilities.

They are involved in all sorts of shoddy deals that include unbridled acquisition of residential and/or commercial stands for themselves, and only their kith and kins, while the rest of the populace is denied access to such essential resource for the continuity of their livelihood. Some councillors are accused of owning numerous flea markets or stalls which they lease out to interested vendors for a fee which they collect weekly or monthly.

In the interest of the public to authenticate such public perceptions, thorough investigations should be instituted to interrogate and expose corrupt allegations levelled against these councillors. Those found on the wrong side of the law should face arrest, prosecution, and the full wrath of the law to promote justice in our communities. This is only feasible when there is full subscription to upholding the rule of law.

Ideally and normatively, council has the mandatory obligation to make the by-laws and decisions for local government, and oversees their administration. These core responsibilities include making the laws and policies, providing financial oversight, planning the budget, and hiring the municipal manager to runs all the daily operations.

It is also responsible for ensuring that the municipal administration fulfils its duties to the community, charge service fees, for instance, using municipal services like water, electricity, libraries, and so on, as well as impose fines for people who break municipal by-laws, for example, traffic fines, littering, and drawing up, approve or amend integrated development plans for the town or city.

The council has prerogative powers to monitor the municipal administration, and review the performance of all aspects of local government, make recommendations to council, oversee provision of services to the community, report annually to council on the effect of community participation and consultation in local government. These powers are exercised either by a mayor, or by an executive committee constituted of councillors.

Where a committee exercises executive powers, it elects a mayor to act as its chairperson, but the mayor does not have greater power than other members of the committee. Like municipal council meetings, the meetings should be open unless it can be seen to be reasonable to exclude the public due to the nature of the agenda.

The executive committee or the mayor must submit a report, and recommendation to municipal council before council decides to pass a by-law, approve a budget, impose rates, taxes or other charges, take out loans, and decide human resource issues such as the hiring or firing, and conditions of service of the municipal manager and heads of administrative departments.

Each municipal council appoints standing committees elected from among its members. Usually these include a finance committee; service committees such as water, sanitation, electricity; human resources; and development committees. The councillor responsible for each department of government is sometimes called the Portfolio Head. So, for example, if one has a problem with water service, he/she can make contact with the head of the water portfolio. Other important committees include the oversight committee and the ethics committee that deals with Code of Conduct matters.

Ward committees are created to encourage participation by the community. Their core responsibility is to make municipal council aware of the needs, expectations and concerns of residents and keep people informed of the activities of municipal council. These ward committees are made up of a ward councillor.

The ward committee is an advisory body, meaning that it can make recommendations to municipal council, but does not have the power to make decisions on its own. Some municipalities pay ward committee members a stipend. The ward committee should be an effective way of spreading information concerning what the community wants from municipal council and what council is doing.

The approach that council takes to fulfilling its role is important for good corporate governance which serves public interest. Its focus should be high level, strategic and policy oriented, rather than operational. For example, council should set the policies and priorities for road maintenance or clean water provision, rather than spend time on discussing what materials should be used on such specific issues.

At any given time, councillors need to understand which critical function their council is performing to satisfy community needs. This will change depending on whether council is setting the vision, developing policy, preparing the budget or managing the Town Clerk's or the Chief Executive Officer's performance.

It is important to realise that council's main responsibilities are to set the overall directions and goals for the municipality and then monitor their implementation and success. The tools for setting these directions and goals are the major strategic plans.

In playing this indispensible role, municipal councillors have a duty to use resources in the best interests of the communities, be democratic and accountable in the way they govern, encourage communities to be involved in the affairs of local government, provide services to the community, and to make sure the environment is safe and healthy.

On the whole municipalities are responsible for the following mandatory functions in terms of the constitution; electricity delivery, water for household use, sewage and sanitation, storm water systems, refuse removal, fire fighting services, municipal health services, decisions around land use, local roads, local public transport, street trading, abattoirs and fresh food markets, parks and recreational areas, other community facilities and local tourism.

In other words, they have the right to make laws and decisions about the affairs of residents and communities in their areas and to claim service fees from residents. In return, the council has a mammoth task to fulfil the public interest in a transparent, accountable, democratic, fair and impartial manner as well realising the need to uphold the rule of law.

In this vein, it is imperative that all the local authorities be subjected to public scrutiny by ensuring that all councillors are audited to ascertain if their flamboyant lifestyles inundating the residents is clean enough for them to be exonerated from any blame. And the councils themselves should be liable to forensic audit to promote transparency in the public eye.

The council audits should also be anchored on land usage bearing in mind that there seems to be numerous illegal activities which are defacing the land or the environment in most of these town and cities. Some of them are deployed illegally on the land along political lines. There is need to synchronise politics and public interest in order to create a balance in the society.

It seems the problem with some of the councillors is that they spring from rags to riches over night. Probably this emanates from the selection procedure for one to contest for the post of councillor. There are no fixed requirements which create a feed forward control measure to safe guard public interest before they are engaged to run council affairs.

In principle, it is prudent to lay down pre-requisites such as qualifications and some form of experience in public administration, as well as the evidence of what real interest the aspiring candidate is intending to safe guard in that particular ward where one wants to be voted as councillor. The conditions may consider, for instance, whether one owns a house, business entity or other tangible interests in the area.

The problem with the current situation is that, all these factors not are considered. Therefore, ward council representatives are ideally seeking to use this post as a job or conduit pipe to riches. Due to lack of relevant prior knowledge and experience, certainly we cannot expect them to be anything better than some of the blunders realised by residents since they operate under trial and error.

It is therefore, imperative to train the current crop of councillors on corporate governance in order to empower them to execute their responsibilities sufficiently lest we are headed for doom in our society