By Anna Chibamu
LOCAL authorities’ councillors must shun political posturing once elected and sworn into office, Local Government Minister Daniel Garwe has said.
Garwe was addressing local authorities’ officials (Mayors and Town Clerks) from the country’s 92 local authorities during the 2024 performance outcomes feedback workshop in Harare last Thursday.
“Local authorities and the ministry must have a relationship-based approach.
Local authorities and the Local Government ministry (which represents the central government) are all appointed by one authority. We are all accountable to the President of the Republic in our various workstations.
“So, we must be able to find each other. I told the Mayor of Bulawayo (David Coltart) last week that we have come here not to fight, but to build bridges,” Garwe said.
He revealed that some people were expecting fights in their minds, which was not the mission.
“So, we said there are some ways to build bridges. All these cities, the 32 urban councils, are all ours.
“The 60 rural councils are all ours. There is no person who exists in this kind that doesn’t belong to a vote. So, this is how important local authorities are to everybody.
“We do not want to be focusing on fault finding. We want to be focusing on correcting the areas where we are not doing well. We should be able to be corrected as well,” he told the officials.
Results for the local authorities performance released showed that most of them had failed to reach their targets for the year.
“Let us take responsibility whenever there is something that we have done correctly. There is no one under the sun who does not make a mistake, nobody.
“All of us make mistakes, but the ability to be able to sit down and diagnose the problem and provide the cure is what makes us different from the rest of the people.”
Garwe urged the local authorities’ bosses to tackle challenges without looking at which party one belonged to.
“We must attend ourselves into challenges. In here, we do not have councillors belonging to political parties. We have councillors belonging to government.
“We are all accountable to government, we are all accountable to this existence. So we leave behind all this political culture behaviour the moment we are sworn into offices.”
Further, he said, “Right now, there are no any chances. We do not need to be mudslinging. We do need to speak to each other, working together to turn around the fortunes of our local authorities.”
The minister also urged council officials and councillors to change their mindset and forget about past fights.
“The local authorities in central government, officials from the minister of Local Government, change your mindset in a positive attitude towards our local authorities.
“We humbly request you to leave positive attitude towards central government.
“We are one government with one vision. We want to turn- around the local governance and avoid focus on what happened in the past,” said Garwe, adding “What is done is done. Let us focus on the future.”
Most local authorities have not done well in the service provision in the last years, mainly due to political fights and corruption, prompting government to privatise most of the services especially in Harare.