THE swearing in of the Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai and his two deputies, Professor Arthur G Mutambara and Ms Thokozani Khupe marks a new beginning in the provision of public services particularly housing delivery, a leading player in the housing property market has said.

Chief executive officer of National Housing Delivery Trust, Energy Mutodi said in a statemnent: "One of the major expectations of the inclusive government was to ensure that there are adequate financial resources to complete public housing projects which had been stalled due to lack of funding".

For too long, Mutodi said, housing finance had been compromised by among other factors, the reluctance of donors to inject funds into the country, low civil service salaries and hyperinflation.

He said under normal circumstances, trust organisations involved in public housing projects should be getting donor funding from wealthy countries especially after the government's clean up exercise of 2005 which left thousands of urban residents homeless.

"However, several donor organisations which we have approached have consistently said that they were waiting for the establishment of inclusive government to intervene in Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis," Mutodi said.

He said the National Housing Delivery Trust he leads has more than 30 000 subscribers mainly civil servants from various government departments, adding that following the formation of the inclusive government, the Trust's resource mobilisation taskforce led by Ms Alma Gordon, would immediately start working closely with the Minister of National Housing in ensuring that civil servants get decent accommodation.

Government in the recent years provided large pieces of land in the peri-urban zone to cooperatives led by former freedom fighters for the development of residential stands but the war veterans failed to utilise this opportunity as they could not afford to hire specialised personnel to do surveys, designs let alone develop roads and sewer systems.

"What is now needed is not to disposess the cooperatives of the land that they have been given but to assist them develop those basics so as to avoid potential health hazards such as the loss of life due to water borne diseases," Mutodi said.

Many housing co-operatives throughout the country have collapsed due to inadequate funding and poor management while scores of prospective home owners have lost money they paid as deposits towards the development of their stands.