The Bulawayo City Council’s (BCC) consultative meetings for the 2024 budget are likely to be affected by the upcoming August elections, the city’s finance manager, Isaac Matare, said on Thursday.
Matare made the remarks during the 2023 budget performance review, where he announced that the first drafts of the 2024 budget must be submitted to the council by August 4.
Zimbabwe will hold its elections on August 23.
He said the local government ministry has asked local authorities to start working on their budgets and submit them by the end of August, with the drafts to be done by September and approved by October.
“This year will be totally different because of elections,” Matare said. “We have elections that are coming. Under normal circumstances, we usually go out and meet residents in their respective wards, but due to the elections we saw it fit to invite people to come to one place and have one meeting.”
Matare implored councillors to work with their ward committees and bring the requested budgets.
“The way council works is through the councillors, who have committees in their wards which discuss issues that affect development,” he said. “Already, most of the wards have got projects and ideas that they want to do. It is from these projects that we are asking them to bring forward so that we may include them in the budget.”
Matare further reiterated that non-payment of rates by residents has affected completion of some projects around the city.
He said money owed by residents has increased from ZWL$18 billion from the beginning of the year to about ZWL$97 billion as of the end of June.
“A lot of the money that we have accrued to the residents remains unpaid,” Matare said. “The rates owed have grown from around ZWL$18 billion from the beginning of the year to about ZWL$97 billion. If residents were able to pay us, a lot of projects would have been done.”
Matare said the council is supposed to do projects using the money that residents pay.
“It then becomes very difficult to do everything that residents expect of us,” he said. “We have got this big gap, and we are asking residents to please pay their rates. Whatever they can pay us will go a long way. It helps the council to fulfill its service delivery mandate.”
