The Sunday News
LOCAL authorities are sitting on top of a gold mine which they have failed to utilise over many years, a move that has seen professional as well as scrupulous contractors taking advantage of that laxity within our local councils.
Their slackness has seen private partners who do not own any piece of land moving in to benefit immensely.
What is a cause for concern is that along the way some people have lost their hard earned savings through dealing with these contractors.
Private contractors have over the past years come up with home ownership schemes whereby people make monthly subscriptions towards owning a house or a piece of land.
This set up has seen the local authorities losing out in terms of revenue generation considering the challenges currently facing most of them.
At the same time this has gone on to compromise standards in Bulawayo as well as other areas across the country through poor or non-existent service delivery by some constructors.
Some residents living in houses built by these bad apples have gone for a number of years without sewer or running water after the laid pipes failed to meet the standard council requirements.
To make matters worse this forces residents to use the nearest bushy area to relieve themselves.
Others have gone on to built septic tanks within the yard posing a serious disease outbreak as seen through so many such cases in Harare where daring residents through indigenous knowledge system relevant in their rural homes have dug wells within their yards.
In addition to that till now some of those areas lack standard roads making them difficult to access for those with personal cars and not to get waste delivery services from the council.
Others are without drainages hence every rainy season they spend sleepless nights trying to block rain water.
If the local authorities can move over and fill this gap as the local custodians of the land who knows; maybe their financial problems could be a thing of the past.
Meanwhile, some sections of Cowdray Park are on the verge of being cut off from the rest of the community after some of the roads which join them with major roads in the area were cut off by rain water.
This has led to cars pushing further into the bush while those on foot walk on the tarmac road littered with potholes.
Such a situation becomes tricky when there are patients or expectant mothers who need the services of an ambulance to come and pick them up at their door steps.
Even though the roads were once done due to omission of other road construction stages they did not survive the torrent rains and running water.
