Peter Tanyanyiwa
The Harare City Council (HCC) committees last Thursday held a joint meeting to try and close loopholes within its systems.
The joint committee meeting presented a platform for Council to adopt new standard operating procedures in an effort to curb corroption.
The Environment Management Committee together with the Housing Committee, the Human Resources Committee and Audit Committee focusing on issues that happened in the Housing and Planning departments which ranged from corruption, poor planning and abuse of office allegations.
In an interview with the Environment Management Committee chairperson Councillor Kudzai Kadzombe highlighted that the local authority aims to close all the loopholes that were raised by the recent cases.
“We were adopting new standard operating procedures to try and close the loopholes that were mentioned within council, when we came in we raised a lot of issues including the proposal to automate the land allocation waiting list, the finalization of the land bank.
“We made a lot of resolutions that were not implemented and in this joint meeting I raised the fact that we need a more proactive technical staff so that we have all the information ready in case the parent Ministry requires this information,” she said.
“This meeting was a huge success and a step in the right direction, going forward you are going to be seeing a lot of work being done on the ground in an effort to capture data, this will include surveying land.
“The senior staff that we have are confirmed by the Ministry, and I hope going forward everything will be transparent,” said Cllr Kadzombe.
Council has promised that with the newly adopted standard operating procedure Harare residents will see a the local authority surveying, being planned and being allocated in a different way that will benefit the local authority and mostly the residents.