The Sunday News
Since coming into office, the New Dispensation led by President Mnangagwa has introduced a lot of reforms to rebuild the country’s economy and to improve on people centred service delivery. One such reform is the decentralisation of the governance system to grassroots level, district and provincial.
Many actors are hard on the ground implementing the envisaged Government vision. Among the key players are Rural District Councils (RDCs) which play a major role in pushing economic and infrastructure development to benefit 60 percent of the country’s population which is resident in the rural areas. Our Beitbridge Bureau Thupeyo Muleya (TM) speaks to former diplomat, academic and former Beitbridge Rural District Council Chief Executive Officer, Dr Aaron Maboyi (AM) on how local authorities can be the main actors in realising the devolution dream.
TM: Poor service delivery in most RDCs, has mainly been attributed to funds and resources shortages. Now that Government is rolling the devolution initiative, what do you think local authorities should do to fit into this framework?
AM: There is nowhere you can find a well full of money. You will have to create that money. However, that depends on your mindset and moral obligation to your people. At the moment one of the greatest problems we are having is that most of the people in leadership including myself are selfish. We think of ourselves and our families first, and not the other people whom we are superior to. Basically, if I come back closer to rural district councils and the possibility of a devolution system, councillors are illiterate to a very large extent. They don’t understand what devolution implies and how it can be implemented.
TM: As a former chief executive at Beitbridge Rural District Council and with your experience as an administrator, what do you think should be the ideal situation to address the issues you mentioned above?
AM: The first task for us in leadership is to educate the councillors on how a ward is endowed with specific riches, resources and how to make the best of it for the benefit of the entire ward and local authority collectively. The respective wards can come up with specific summaries on what it implies to make the specific ward viable and what people in that ward have, and their plans in furthering their economic growth. We need to bring together all those resources from the wards and that is where the rural district councils can start making revenue. Secondly, as local authorities, we must re-engage on what kind of people we employ in our institutions, do they have the right mindset and capacity to actually think outside the box, to create money?
TM: How do you rate the current work ethic and understanding of what needs to be done under devolution by employees?
AM: We have lots of possibilities that they can use. The current employees in rural district councils are only concerned about salaries and they don’t know themselves and where that salary comes from. They must be given the honours (tasks) of creating that income and together with their councillors they must work out a ratio to be used for workers’ salaries and council development. At the moment, even if the council creates the money from various taxes and levies, all that money goes to employee salaries at the expense of services delivery. It is very critical that all the personalities that are employed in those councils must understand what we are talking about. It’s not possible to move when we have people who cannot interpret a policy or statutory instrument. We want people who can practically implement Government’s wishes in line with specified policies.
TM: The Government has poured money to provinces for devolution related projects, what can local authorities do to raise their own revenue for a similar cause besides waiting for Treasury?
AM: There are a lot of projects councils can use to make money. At one time when I was a chief executive officer of Beitbridge Rural District Council, I introduced something which is still serviceable. That is creating sub offices at Zezani, Tshituripasi, and Chaswingo, among other areas. This is where local people can levy each other for homesteads, livestock and so on. They will then sit down and say since we have raised money from levying ourselves, how much should be left for development in the ward and how much should be sent to the local authority. I don’t know how that went to naught. We have many sources of water which await exploitation. For instance, we have the Zhovhe dam which if put to proper use can turn this district into an agro-based economy. At some point in 1997, I came up with a plan and approached the World Bank and they gave us ZWL$87 million for Beitbridge and I can prove it, but unfortunately, things were over centralised all that money was taken by Central Government and redistributed to 52 local authorities. Each rural district council received around $1,6 million. The money became meaningless and the projects I had convinced World Bank about was the utilisation of Zhovhe water. By then one Ferusa, an engineer had designed a project to reticulate water all the way to Tshituripasi (in Beitbridge East) through gravity from Jopembe Mountain. Had we succeeded, we would in turn had a number of irrigation projects to address food and nutrition issues and improved self-sustenance at household level. But now we are not able to do that. These are some of the issues we can revisit among others in line with the provisions of devolution we seek to achieve.
TM: How can Rural District Development Committees (RDDCs) and Rural District Councils work together under this concept (devolution)?
AM: It is important to rope everyone with progressive minds to pull in one direction. However, you must note that as long as you are interested in creating development, Government employees must only play advisory roles, not functional. Once a Government employee plays a role of functionality and considering their conditions of service there will be too much relaxation. In addition, our RDCs have people who don’t know exactly what to do and have limited knowledge and also are affected by red tape. They have to go through many processes necessary and unnecessary to implement one simple project.
TM: So how can they (RDCs) be helped to realise their potential?
AM: As a Government, we must give the local authorities two things, the first is the power to determine the specific resources that they have and how they should be used. Secondly, there must be an independent monitoring system for those projects we want to embark on. Unless we do that, we will be creating a circle of going back and forward and there will be no progress. The wealth we have will remain unexploited or the people will fail to benefit from the vast resources around them.
TM: If you are to get an opportunity to actively participate in matters to do with devolution, what role would you settle for?
AM: I would volunteer on a programme to educate them (councillors and provincial council members). We have councillors but we need to educate them, not in workshops, instead we have to induct them properly into the working systems and the values of those systems. Even though some of these people are not highly educated they will grasp what we want to do. For example, if we are talking about cattle or the entire livestock production in general. In Matabeleland South, we have people who have the requisite knowledge in that area. Most of the Venda people here (Beitbridge) understand the importance or value, but we need to structure a programme of educating councillors at local and provincial level, for them to understand the Government thrust on devolution.
TM: In terms of policy implementation, for instance on investment laws how can the issues of National policy vs Local policy be handled better?
AM: First of all, you must identify the areas and economies of provinces and the right personnel. If we don’t have such, let’s create a cadet of educating people who can understand those issues so that they can practically implement the Government policy.
TM: Considering that economic drivers and opportunities differ from province to province, what is happening in Matabeleland South with regards to investment promotion?
AM: At the moment I don’t know because I am not in the system to come up with an implementation system. We must identify persons who understand the region and areas and get them involved. As I have said I can volunteer for Mat South or Beitbridge. I can volunteer, we are not talking about positions or personalities, and we are talking about entities to promote real development issues. We are hoping that authorities will listen to progressive minds to make the devolution concept work.
