By Claude Phuti
The arrest of councilors on allegations of corruption, extortion, bribery, abuse of office, and procurement irregularities has become an almost routine occurrence in Zimbabwe. Every few months, another councilor, mayor, deputy mayor, or committee chairperson appears before the courts or is investigated by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC).
The recent arrest of Bulawayo Deputy Mayor Edwin Ndlovu, Councilor Ntandoyenkosi Ndlovu, Mxolisi Mahlangu, Ashton Mhlanga and former councilor Alderman Rodney Jele over allegations of attempting to extort US$52,000 from a businessman in connection with a hotel development lease is merely the latest example in a growing trend that has become all too familiar across Zimbabwe’s local authorities.
While public debate often focuses on the guilt or innocence of the individuals involved, more important question is rarely asked. Why do these cases keep happening? At what point do we stop treating them as isolated incidents and begin examining the broken institutional arrangements that repeatedly place elected officials in positions where corruption opportunities arise? The issue may not simply be that some councilors are corrupt. It may be that Zimbabwe’s urban governance system breeds fertile ground that exposes elected representatives to decisions they should never be making in the first place.
On this topic
The role of a councilor should be straightforward. Under the Urban Councils Act, citizens elect these officials to govern municipalities and towns through policy, oversight, and budget approval. Residents vote during political campaigns based on popular support, trusting that their elected representatives will champion quality service provision and community interests. However, popularity, which often decides the vote, and competence are not the same thing. Councilors are not elected based on technical expertise as engineers, accountants, quantity surveyors, procurement specialists, economists, urban planners, or lawyers. An official may be highly respected by constituents but possess little technical knowledge of complex public procurement regulations or urban planning frameworks.
Despite this lack of technical background from some councilors, some councilors assume that electoral success confers expertise in everything, thus councilors often pivot from policy oversight into deep involvement with administrative and commercial matters. This shift occurs when they advise on procurement decisions, oversee the approval of developmental plans, the renewal or cancellation of lease agreements, the awarding of major commercial tenders and, evaluate infrastructure contracts. Recent examples highlight this boundary blurring, such as tenders given to private land developers, the City Parking scandals in major cities such as Bulawayo and Harare, and the lease agreement controversy currently unearthed by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) in Bulawayo. It is precisely within these technical spaces that allegations of corruption repeatedly emerge such as the ones currently facing Bulawayo’s Deputy Mayor and 3 other current councilors and one former Councilor. Driven by systemic flaws, councilors abuse their power by waiving or evading existing by-laws to push through these specific contracts and leases, all at a price.
This is neither fair to councilors nor healthy for local authorities. Professional expertise is acquired through training and experience, not through elections. We do not expect an elected councilor to perform surgery simply because they won an election. Equally, we should not expect them to make highly technical decisions involving multimillion-dollar contracts and complex commercial transactions.
Best practices drawn from around the world demonstrate the importance of separating politics from public administration. In countries such as the United Kingdom, local councilors establish policy priorities and approve budgets, but procurement decisions are largely managed by professional officers operating within strict legal and procedural frameworks. Councilors exercise oversight but do not sit around evaluating bid documents and deciding which contractor should win a tender. In South Africa, municipal legislation similarly places significant responsibility for procurement implementation and administration under accounting officers and municipal managers, while elected representatives focus on governance and oversight. In many European municipalities, land valuation, development approvals, procurement evaluations, and infrastructure management are undertaken by professional departments staffed by qualified experts who can be held accountable through audits and regulatory oversight. To add, those occupying high profile offices such as Mayors, Deputy Mayors, Chairpersons of Committees amongst others should be excused of their duties if they are facing corruption allegations until they have managed to clear themselves from the allegations.
Separating policy design from operationalexecution is crucial to reducing corruption, patronage, and rent-seeking. While politicians should establish rules and policies based on citizens’ needs, technocrats must implement them. Zimbabwe’s local authorities would benefit immensely from clarifying these boundaries. Councilors should limit their roles strictly to policy creation and performance oversight so as to ensure that procurement frameworks are robust, targets are met, and residents receive value for money. They must be completely excluded from transactional decisions where personal influence can be abused, such as adjudicating tenders, allocating land, negotiating leases, or assessing development proposals. Further, doing so will go a long way in addressing one of the Auditor Generals’ main concerns year in year out on implementing audit recommendations so as to mitigate mounting financial irregularities.
The recurring corruption cases suggest that the current model incentivizes exactly the wrong behavior. Considering how many local government scandals across Zimbabwe involve land allocations, housing stands, procurement contracts, lease agreements, or development rights. In Harare these have resultantly led to land barons building and or allocating stands on restricted areas such as wetlands and citizens have paid the price with recent demolitions targeting over 5000 houses with areas such as Harare South, Whitecliff, St Martins area amongst others already being affected. These are not random occurrences. They are concentrated in areas where political influence intersects with valuable economic opportunities. Every time a councilor gains the ability to influence who receives land, who obtains a contract, or who secures a lease, the risk of corruption increases. In Bulawayo recently councilors during a full council meeting wanted to waiver and or bypass the local authority by-laws by granting approval of the establishment of an unlicensed nightclub in Luveve and ignore the advice of the Town Planning department which highlighted multiple planning violations. Even where no corruption occurs, these systematic gaps erode public confidence on local government institutions.
The consequences extend beyond governance. Corruption at local authority level directly affects service delivery. When municipal resources are diverted or contracts are improperly awarded, roads remain unrepaired, refuse collection deteriorates, water systems collapse, and infrastructure projects stall. The Auditor General’s report for the financial year ending December 2024 exposed deep rooted financial mismanagement at Gweru City Council’s with amounts totaling over ZWL$4,5 billion of unreconciled banks variances and also failed to account for infrastructure assets such as roads, bridges and sewer systems and also failed to recognize financial records for four council run schools. In Bulawayo the report showed that the local authority lacked proper title deeds and ownership documents to council properties amongst other shortcomings. Citizens bear the consequences not as abstract governance failures but as daily hardships in the form of poor access to basic public services. The public loses trust not only in individual councilors but in democratic institutions more broadly.
As Zimbabwe continues its constitutional alignment process and the implementation of devolution which is also in its National Development strategy 2 (ND2), reform of the Urban Councils Act, Rural District Council Act and Provincial Councils Act should be approached as more than a technical legal exercise. It is an opportunity to reshape the local governance spectrum by redesigning the relationship between elected officials and municipal administrations. A modernized framework should explicitly remove councilors from procurement adjudication processes, land allocation decisions, contract management functions, and operational administrative decisions. These responsibilities should rest with qualified technocrats operating under a robust system with transparent rules, professional standards, competitive recruitment systems, and independent oversight mechanisms. Councilors should focus on legislation, policy, representation, oversight, budget approval, and accountability.
Such reforms would not undermine democracy, on the contrary, they would strengthen it. Democratic systems function best when elected officials focus on representing citizens, leaving qualified professionals to implement decisions according to law. Therefore, the persistent cycle of councilor arrests across Zimbabwe is not merely a law enforcement issue, but clear evidence of a structural governance failure. Until the nation draws a definitive line between political oversight and administrative execution, these scandalous headlines will not stop. Local authorities will continue to face investigations and prosecutions, while residents are left wondering why essential service delivery remains so poor. The time has come to adopt a proven global principle, which is, politicians must make policy, and technocrats must implement it. Establishing these boundaries may be the most effective anti-corruption reform Zimbabwe can introduce to rescue its collapsing urban governance and realize the goals on NDS2.
Claude Phuti is a programs Manager at Bulawayo Progressive Residents’ Association. He can be contacted at +263779631183
Leave a Reply