Thabiso Nxumalo
Masvingo City Council management has been challenged to maintain a tight grip on their properties as a way of safeguarding against corrupt activities on the leasing of council premises by the visiting members of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
Speaking during a visit for audit at Masvingo council on March 30, Norton legislator Temba Mliswa who is part of the PAC said that there are rumours that over 300 tenants occupy council buildings rent free attributing the matter as a case of corruption and collusion and thus Town Clerk Engineer Edward Mukaratirwa should stand the ground.
“We did our research before coming here and we heard that there are over 300 tenants who are occupying council buildings and houses for free and view that as an act of corruption and collusion.
“Council need these revenues from tenants. We should not respect that they are government institutions, they should simply pay and council must start weeding out such institutions without fear or favour,” said Mliswa.
Eng Mukaratirwa denied any corrupt acts by the council and said they are aware of the matter and they had caught up with the tenants and are in the process of recovering the amount of those who are owing dating 25 years back and said most of them are government institutions.
“We are aware of the issue and we have done investigations and caught up with those institutions and updated our books and we have the amount owed by those properties and reviewed how much they owe and we have given those tenants up to the end of this year to have fully paid.
“We have also reviewed our lease agreements to tenants and reduced the lease duration to a period of just three years and are now reviewing our rates every six months and we hope that as we migrate to the digital system abandoning the paper one it will be much easier to track and manage our revenue,” said Eng Mukaratirwa.
Mayor Cllr Collen Maboke said that they will work on drafting a water tight contract for tenants and advised council to have their own legal department so as to safeguard revenue inflow and curb contract breaches.
“With my law background, I feel it is necessary for council to have a legal team of their own and draft water tight contracts to tenants as these lease agreements we give to clients must safeguard breaches in case of failure to pay
“In the existing contract we do have clauses that safeguard breach of contracts but the problem becomes enforcement on our part,” said Maboke.
Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chaired by Dexter Nduna was in Masvingo to follow up the auditor’s general report on Masvingo.
