The Sunday News
Sunday News Correspondent
A house in Bulawayo’s Entumbane suburb near Mthombowesizwe Primary School with broken windows and a yard with overgrown grass and weeds stands out as a deserted place.
In the olden days, one would be forgiven to think it was a haunted one which the owners fled fearing goblins or some other imaginary creature which had given the family a torrid time forcing it to say “enough is enough” before packing their bags and leaving.
Go to neighbouring Emakhandeni suburb you will see a house in a similar state in the A section of the suburb.
Move to Mpopoma, near the Mambo Shopping Centre, you will see a notice, “room to rent”, which is fading showing that it has been there for ages.
Houses without curtains, signifying non-occupation, are now “fashionable” in the city’s high density suburbs and notices of rooms or houses to rent are pasted on buildings with lots of human traffic like popular shops in the Central Business District.
But move over to the new suburb of Cowdray Park- where quite a number of house owners are in neighbouring South Africa and the Diaspora, people are falling over each other to occupy recently built houses or those partially completed without electricity.
Such tenants use generators and solar power while others use firewood to cook and thereby play cat and mouse games with Bulawayo City Council rangers trying to stop the illegal cutting of trees.
But what has gone wrong?
“When you see people preferring to leave well constructed houses and go to live in houses some of them partially complete without water and electricity then know that it’s a situation where someone just says I just need a roof over my head and everything else will follow,” explains Consumer Council of Zimbabwe regional manager for Matabeleland Mr Comfort Muchekeza.
“They would rather pay the $20 rather than go for $60 per room.”
The regional manager of the consumer watchdog says it would be understandable if rooms in finished houses with water and electricity in suburbs like Cowdray Park would charge more than in old suburbs.
“Look at houses in Mpopoma, which were built 40 or 50 years ago and rent for a room is $50,” he says. “Yet when you look at the return on investment, you realise the cost of building the house in Mpopoma were re-couped a long time ago.”
Mr Muchekeza, who is a former member of the Industrial and Commercial Rent Board, says generally rentals in the city are “prohibitive”.
“Generally people get paid an average of $450 per month and a family might rent a four roomed house in the high density suburbs and have to pay a $250 per month including water and electricity which translates to more than half the salary and that goes to accommodation only before factoring in other expenses,” he says.
Like the rest of the prices, rentals became distorted in the post 2009 period when dollarization was introduced.
A quick check on the Internet reveals that a three bed-roomed house is being offered for $280 per month in Bulawayo’s Pumula South.
The managing director of Ken Estates whose headquarters is in Bulawayo, Mr Kennedy Ndebele, agrees that rentals are proving to be out of reach of many tenants hence there is a high rent default rate.
“Yes, there are a lot of houses that are not occupied,” he says. “Currently, the (effective) demand is low in the market.
People are struggling and the rate of rent default is high. In the high density areas you may find a house whose rent price is an average of $100 to $200 but after that it’s difficult to get people who are prepared to pay that.”
Mr Ndebele says the economic situation characterised by high unemployment and the wave of the retrenchments that have hit the country have compounded the situation.
The landmark 17 July 2015 Supreme Court judgment on retrenchments caused over 25 000 job losses within a month.
“We have a situation where some people are retrenched and people prefer to lodge in a room for instance under such circumstances than rent a full house,” said says Mr Ndebele.
Mr Ndebele explains that as estate agents they usually want people with a stable income and who are able to pay both the deposit and the rent and are expected to pay electricity and water separately.
“It’s difficult to get quality tenants,” he says. “Usually they can’t afford. If they fail to pay, the process of evicting them is frustrating. There is a legal process that has to be followed by the Rent Board but usually through the magistrates courts because there might need to be goods attached to recover the owed money. And even then the goods might not fetch prices equivalent to their value at an auction.”
Mr Ndebele says at times they are now forced to advise clients who want to increase rents not to do so because they will merely be increasing the risk of what would have hitherto a good tenant turning into a bad one after defaulting.
“So rather than rent increase we advise rent reduction,” he says. “This is because rent increase merely increases rate and risk of default. We had companies like Cold Storage Company and National Railways of Zimbabwe providing us a pool of good clients but they are performing poorly. Even the civil service.”
The chairman of the Bulawayo United Residents Association, Mr Winos Dube, also admits there is a problem of rentals and their affordability in Bulawayo.
“It’s quite clear that there is a problem and we are concerned as a residents association leadership,” he said. “Our people are out of employment, there are no jobs in Bulawayo, industry has collapsed. When you hear that a big company like National Railways of Zimbabwe has gone for 15 months without paying its workers, you then ask yourself how they are paying their rentals because they have to do that on a monthly basis. You then think maybe there is a need for controls of rentals but then these properties belong to individuals who are free to charge what they want.
“It’s a catch 22 situation. You need to have the issue looked into at a higher level.”
Mr Muchekeza also thinks the issue of Government gazetting rentals should be toyed with or a mechanism found for banks to give mortgage loans for people to build their own houses instead of renting.
In 2015, one of the country’s biggest building societies, CABS, had problems finding buyers for its two roomed core houses meant for the “low income group” and the financial institution defined a low income earner as someone with a monthly salary of $750, which is way above the poverty datum line.
But Bura chairman, Mr Dube, says maybe the recently announced Government initiative to provide stands for housing construction in Bulawayo might be the solution to the problem.
“We hope the initiative that the Ministry of Local Government has announced of availing stands for housing development will become a reality and there will be more houses available,” he says. “Otherwise we will continue having a problem on our hands.”
Recently, the Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, Cde Saviour Kasukuwere announced that 300 hectares of land had been identified in Bulawayo for the construction of 20 000 residential houses for the city’s youths.
But the Bulawayo Mayor, Councillor Martin Moyo, has thrown spanners into the works insisting there is no need to “panic” as there is no housing crisis in Bulawayo hence Mr Dube’s cautionary statement, if the project “becomes a reality”.
“I believe as a local authority we are already on a positive note.”
Cde Kasukuwere will have none of that and insists the Government wants to ensure that people own houses instead of looking for accommodation to rent thereby being reduced to perpetual lodgers.
He says lodgers are treated in an undignified manner.
Perhaps the Minister is right.
How many times have you seen a 60-year-old tenant kneeling down before a 30-year-old landlord- young enough to be their child and calling him “father” or “mother”?
