Ngoni Dapira

UNITED Mutare Residents and Ratepayers Trust and the City of Mutare municipality have resolved to smoke the peace pipe and build bridges on civic engagement and service delivery concerns in the eastern border city.

The city of Mutare held its first joint press conference with UMRRT last week Friday to announce this development and said both organizations have one common agenda to see a better and fully developed Mutare with excellent infrastructure and service delivery.

Mutare Mayor Blessing Tandi admitted that the local authority was lagging behind on its financials, but said they were working tirelessly to address the legacy debts and improve on transparency of its financials to the public. He said the new arrangement with the local residents body was a gesture of their willpower to enhance civic engagement.

“UMRRT representing the residents of Mutare is a critical stakeholder for us a local authority. Our relationship is knitted on service delivery hence the decision to sit down together and forge the way forward for the city…What we have observed is that as a local authority were lagging behind on stakeholder engagement. As the Mayor I said our motive should be on more and more engagement, of which UMRRT is a resident’s organization in the city that we have decided to engage on this initiative. We have therefore tried to find one another and we are saying to them whenever you see us sleeping on duty please knock on our door,” said Mayor Tandi.

UMRRT board vice-chairman Jephias Mundondo applauded the willpower gesture by the Mutare municipality to foster civic engagement, which he said will help boost people’s ‘confidence’ view in the local authority. Mr Mundondo added that the arrangement was a progressive breakthrough which they hope to see producing positive results.

“This has not happened before, it’s actually the first time to see this type of arrangement. This has come after a process of analyzing what needs to be done to make a way forward by both institutions. One of the key issues was on engagement between council and ratepayers and other organisations which are stakeholders in the ongoing plight to get service delivery standards up to an acceptable level. We also picked up that engagement was there but it was not continuous and this what we want to correct…Council has a duty for feedback. So there is going to be continuous engagement starting from participation on budget formulation to feedback on how the budget will be working. We also need to unpack the budget for residents to fully understand the day to operations of Council,” said Mundondo.

The local authority and the resident’s representative body resolved to forge strong ties in pushing the service delivery agenda, upscale civic education, improve engagement and participation of residents in consultation processes, jointly fight corruption and ensure transparency and openness in the public entity among a host of other areas.

This development comes at a time when corruption and lack of public integrity in local authorities had become a cause for concern and residents associations were taking it upon themselves to address the scourge.

Lifestyle audits which include declaration of assets has been identified as an important tool to address corruption, especially those working in the public entities, of which Section  68 of the Constitution provides for the declaration of assets (by public officials). UMRRT, boasts of being the leading residents association in Mutare with members in all the 19 wards in the city.

Maligwa said the municipality is owed over $90 million of unpaid water bills. He added that the current water tarrif of $2.45 per megalitre, which was approved in March, is already unsustainable to ensure service delivery and maintenance of the city’s water works, in the wake of the soaring inflation rate in the country.