Harare council adopts explosive land-grab report
http://www.thestandard.co.zw/
Saturday, 03 April 2010 20:09
A special Harare City Council meeting last week adopted a report exposing alleged illicit land deals involving flamboyant businessman, Phillip Chiyangwa and Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo.
The report which covers the period between October 2004 and December 2009 shows that irregular acquisitions, mainly by prominent Zanu PF officials, were rampant during the period under investigation.
The report recommends that Chiyangwa be arrested for allegedly using underhand means to acquire land, some of it in the plush Borrowdale neighbourhood.
It also recommends that disciplinary action be taken against some council officials including director of urban planning services Psychology Chiwanga and finance director Cosmas Zvikaramba who allegedly aided the corrupt acquisitions.
However Mayor Muchadeyi Masunda and some councillors differed sharply on the way forward amid fears that the report could be swept under the carpet like previous reports raising issues of corruption in the local authority.
At a meeting on Thursday where the 54-page report was presented, Ward 28 Councillor Wellington Chikombo appealed to Masunda to ensure that the report’s recommendations were implemented.
Chikombo has genuine fears given that he, together with other councillors were last year appointed into a special committee that investigated alleged theft of meat from Jameson Hotel.
The meat was supposed to be consumed at the inauguration of Masunda as the Mayor but mysteriously disappeared only to be found in the freezers of the Harare hotel.
Council instituted a probe and a subsequent report on the matter is yet to be implemented months after being endorsed by council.
At the special meeting last week, some special-interest councillors unsuccessfully tried to block discussions on the land acquisition report but MDC-T councillors who dominate council successfully pushed for the
discussions.
Led by Thembinkosi Magwaliba, special-interest councillors said they were named in the report and felt they should have been given an opportunity to defend themselves while others said they had not been given enough time to read through the document.
Masunda’s attempt to protect the named officials by discussing the document in committee without the media and other non-councillors or through avoiding mentioning names was also rejected by MDC-T councillors.
Led by Panganai Charumbira, the MDC-T councillors threatened to walk out of the meeting should the mayor protect the named officials, as that would be equal to discrimination since he (Masunda) never protected MDC-T councillors from attack by the state media.
It was MDC-T’s voice that carried the day as the report was discussed and endorsed by the majority.
“We are done,” Dumba said in an interview. “The report has been adopted by council and it is now an official document.
“The next step is for the mayor to implement the recommendations as you heard him being delegated by council to do so.
“The issues the special interest councillors were raising do not hold any water.
“All information in that document is factual as we only extracted it from the files thus eliminating any need for us to interview anyone regarding it.”
But Masunda said the report cannot be immediately implemented as it had some loopholes, among them failure to give named people a right to reply.
“The committee has to attend to some matters left hanging in the air and then present me with a complete report,” Masunda said. “I will then sit down with the Chamber Secretary and discuss the way forward.
“In all fairness, I will have to give all the people cited in that report, especially council functionaries, an opportunity to give their side of the story.
“I have a moral and professional obligation to ensure that nobody is treated unfairly and thus I cannot jump the gun the same way the media has been reporting on the report saying some people should be arrested.
“Each and every one of the named people should be allowed to present his or her own side of the story and that is what we call fairness and transparency.”
Presenting the report, Dumba said some pages which could contain evidence to some allegations raised in the report were missing from council files and Masunda said that was another flaw which needed to be addressed.
Dumba said some people had taken advantage of the fact that council files are public documents and plucked out pages which could contain some of the evidence.
Masunda said some form of evidence should be availed for him to assess whether the city had been prejudiced in any way.
BY JENNIFER DUBE