Residents in Bulawayo have challenged the new councilors to prioritise service delivery and a good working relationship between the local authority and communities citing water as a major concern.
Residents indicated that their major concern was water, as Bulawayo has long faced acute water shortages.
“Our councillors will need to prioritise access to clean water,” said Marilyn Ncube, a resident in QueensPark West Suburb.
“We have been receiving dirty brown water for weeks now. If you check the containers you will see the brown residue on the bottom and that is frightening because you wonder what we are drinking.”
Ncube noted that buying purified water was expensive, so they resorted to boiling water.
Witness Bhebhe, another Trenance resident, stated that councillors must prioritise cleanliness in the city and health access in the community.
“The City of Bulawayo needs to prioritise sanitisation. Everyone can see the decay of our beloved city and that is painful,” he lamented.
“Tied to sanitation and cleanliness is the healthy delivery system. Council needs to make sure people have access to quality healthcare within their local institutions,” he said.
Bhebhe added another priority was the road infrastructure.
“We have potholes everywhere. Our roads are a disaster and rehabilitation needs to happen otherwise we will have no roads at all,” Bhebhe said.
Louette Hunt also from Trenance added “the city is in urgent need of a serious service delivery across the board and councillors cannot afford to fail people in any way.”
“We now need to see the work, be it cleaning streets, picking litter, improving water quality and access,” Hunt said.
Political analyst, Effie Ncube, noted residents were justified to make these calls because these are difficulties they face daily.
More significantly, Ncube said councillors will need to prioritise ties between themselves and Bulawayo residents.
“Sometimes it gets so, so difficult. But for you to successfully govern well you need the support of the community, so councillors will need to mobilise the local community. Work with them at the ward level to make sure they have sufficient information about what is transpiring at Council level, what they have, what they don’t have, the limitations and everything that is at their disposal,” Ncube recommended.
“So, the mayor and councillors have a huge responsibility waiting for them.”
However, Ncube stated the first challenge for the mayor is that the position is not executive mayor and thus an individual cannot rely on their singular capacity but needs collective capacity.
“Success will need institutional capacity, working with all others to ensure that you deliver services that people are waiting for. But also, the council needs to build bridges across into the business sector to mobilise resources that are in the business sector.”
Ncube stated that there are also factors that are dependent on the national government, so councillors will need to build bridges to make sure there is coordination between the local authority, the national government and provincial councillors if they are given the authority to function as the Constitution envisages.
“So by and large, that is what is waiting for the mayor and councillors. Most importantly, they will need to be united because one of the things that debilitates council capacities is the level of divisions that we usually see in councils, where they spend a lot of time squabbling amongst each other. So they would need to prevent that from happening so that as a collective they are able to deliver the kind of services that people want to see in Bulawayo,” he summed.
