Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, had the reputation of being the country’s best-run local authority. Apart from being the capital of Matabeleland, it has the distinction of being the only council to be run by an opposition party,
But now the council is collapsing under the economic hardships that the country has experienced in the past decade. Services are failing. Potholes fill the city’s roads, council employees’ salaries are not paid on time and the council has no money to buy chemicals to purify the city’s water. The council is, essentially, bankrupt.
City officials blame the central government for the crisis, accusing it of having delayed approval of the council’s budget and meddled in the city’s finances. But in the run-up to local authority elections this Saturday, the ruling Zanu-PF party is using the deterioration in the city’s services and the lack of cash to discredit the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which runs the council.
Other urban local authorities face a similar plight. Recently the government announced plans to abolish the post of executive mayor across the country. Executive mayors who, until the changes, were directly elected ran councils together with town clerks who served as the city’s chief executive officer.
The government’s reason for abolishing executive mayorships is that the two roles overlapped. But its critics within local authorities say the real reason is that the ruling party lost control of almost all urban councils when the opposition MDC, which has a strong following among urbanites, won most mayoral contests in the previous local authority elections.
The ruling party would not accept that urban councils, including the capital, Harare, where the president and his Cabinet reside, had become hubs of opposition power and at the first opportunity restructured the system of local government to reverse opposition gains in urban areas.
The introduction in 1995 of the post of executive mayor brought greater democracy to local government. Previously, the unelected town clerk headed the management team and often overruled the councils, which were made up of elected officials. Executive mayors who were elected and had executive powers made the system more democratically accountable.
“Under the system, local authorities were now structured like the government with its three arms: the executive, the judiciary and the legislature. The executive mayor represented the executive, the town clerk and his management team stood for the judiciary as they made sure that council operated within the law, while the councillors were the legislature,” Bulawayo deputy mayor Phil Lamola said.
But after Saturday’s elections, executive mayors will be replaced by ceremonial mayors who will be selected by fellow councillors from a pool of elected councillors. Provincial administrators will oversee the election for mayor, implying that the new mayors will be answerable to the provincial governor.
“This is a very sad development. An elected official, who will be representing the interests of the people of the city, is being replaced by an appointed official who has no following but panders to the whims of the government,” Lamola said. “We had taken one step forward to improve democracy in local authorities, but we have now taken two steps back.
“If it is true that there were clashes between the town clerk and the executive mayor — which I must admit is true — the government should simply have set the parameters under which the two should operate. They were stepping on each other’s toes because it was not clear who the boss was.”
Before the latest changes, he said, local authorities were fighting to have their powers and functions enshrined and protected in the Constitution in order to prevent meddling by the minister of local government.
Lamola says the future of local authorities in Zimbabwe is bleak because this shift in the system further weakens local government. Ultimately, he says, the ruling government has made sure that councils will have to dance to the tune of the central government even when their elected officials are from the opposition.