Government has been urged to enforce restrictions on local authority spending and hold officials accountable for financial mismanagement, with analysts warning that bans on luxury vehicle purchases and foreign trips will do little to resolve salary arrears and poor service delivery without effective oversight.
The concerns were raised during This Morning on Asakhe, a CITE current affairs programme, where panellists questioned whether the latest government directive would address the financial management failures and accountability gaps affecting local authorities or repeat previous warnings without meaningful action.
The government has banned local authorities with outstanding salary arrears from undertaking foreign trips and purchasing vehicles for senior managers.
In a circular dated 20 October, Local Government and Public Works permanent secretary Engineer Tafadzwa Muguti said the ministry was concerned about salary arrears running into several months at some local authorities, alongside outstanding statutory obligations.
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Political analyst Future Msebele said the government needed to move beyond issuing circulars and demonstrate its willingness to act against officials who disregarded its directives.
He said Circular 9 was not the first attempt to curb unnecessary expenditure by local authorities, questioning what action had been taken against officials who failed to comply with previous restrictions.
“The government has to enforce these circulars. You don’t just produce circulars for the sake of a PR exercise, but they need to go after the officials,” Msebele said.
He said the government needed mechanisms to monitor compliance, assess the impact of its interventions and hold those responsible for financial mismanagement accountable.
Msebele also called on the government to explain what had happened following earlier directives, including one issued in June 2025, given that similar concerns persisted.
Citing the 2024 Auditor-General’s report on local authorities, Msebele said 361 of 639 previously identified audit issues remained unresolved, while 83 had been partially addressed and 195 had been resolved.
The figures mean that more than half of the issues reviewed remained outstanding, raising questions about oversight and accountability within local authorities.
Msebele argued that restrictions on expenditure would not address the underlying problems if councils continued to ignore audit recommendations.
He called on local authorities to prioritise salary payments, investigate suspected financial abuse, make procurement records publicly accessible and disclose outstanding audit issues.
He also urged the government to publish information on what it owed local authorities, saying council finances could not be assessed fairly without accounting for obligations owed to them by central government.
“A circular is not a budget. It’s just a warning,” Msebele said, cautioning that officials could temporarily suspend certain expenditure before returning to the same practices once public attention shifted.
Ellaine Manyere of Fight Inequality said the restrictions should be assessed against the impact of financial mismanagement on council workers and residents who depend on local authorities for essential services.
She said delayed salaries had become a burden for council employees, some of whom were forced to seek salary advances for money they were already owed.
Manyere said the situation undermined workers’ dignity, weakened morale and affected productivity, with consequences for residents who rely on councils for water supplies, refuse collection and other basic services.
“When a worker is not paid, it usually trickles down to us as the people who are supposed to receive the service delivery from a specific local authority,” she said.
She argued that restrictions on expensive vehicles and foreign trips risked addressing the symptoms of financial mismanagement without tackling its underlying causes.
Manyere also questioned whether the directive would be implemented effectively, given concerns about the lack of clear consequences for officials who disregarded government instructions.
She said government statements promising action against those responsible had not been matched by visible accountability.
Residents, who finance local authorities through rates and other charges, were also often excluded from decisions about public spending and how financial problems should be addressed, she said.
“Residents are always seen as a source of revenue, but they are not also being seen as rights holders in these conversations,” she said.
Manyere called for residents to be involved in monitoring council expenditure and assessing whether local authorities were implementing corrective measures.
She also questioned the relationship between central government oversight and local authority autonomy, arguing that accountability should extend to institutions responsible for approving and overseeing major purchases and international trips.
Youth governance expert McDonald Munyoro said the challenges facing local authorities were rooted in structural weaknesses, including poor financial management, ineffective revenue collection and the utilisation of available resources.
He argued that restrictions on discretionary spending would not resolve these problems unless the government also addressed weaknesses in financial controls and accountability.
“The challenges that are faced by our local authorities have got to do with structural issues where we have got deficits in terms of financial management, in terms of revenue collection, utilisation,” Munyoro said.
He said Auditor-General reports highlighted the need for the government to look beyond spending restrictions when developing measures to address the financial difficulties facing councils.
“The Auditor-General’s reports are particularly relevant because they identify weaknesses in revenue collection, procurement, governance and infrastructure, alongside service delivery problems,” he said.
Munyoro said the recurrence of these problems in successive reports suggested that local authorities were facing persistent institutional and financial management failures rather than isolated cases of excessive spending.
He said the number of unresolved audit issues pointed to the need for stronger oversight and more effective follow-up on the Auditor-General’s recommendations.
Munyoro said the 2024 report identified 639 issues for review, of which 31% had been fully addressed, 13% partially addressed and 56% remained outstanding.
He added that gaps in financial reporting made it difficult to establish the full extent of the problems facing individual local authorities, including their salary arrears and compliance with the latest directive.
“You’d find that some of the local authorities provide information that is incomplete, and on that basis, it then also becomes very difficult to really ascertain which local authorities are actually going to be affected by this particular directive,” he said.
Munyoro also pointed to discrepancies between payroll records and financial statements in some councils, as well as management allowances and benefits that were not subjected to tax.
He said these weaknesses highlighted the need to strengthen financial controls rather than rely solely on restrictions targeting foreign trips and luxury vehicles.
The panellists’ concerns point to a broader challenge for government: whether the latest directive will be backed by effective enforcement and accountability measures. Without improvements in financial management and revenue collection, restrictions on discretionary spending alone are unlikely to resolve salary arrears and service delivery problems.
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