IN January, under a major Government initiative, Operation Chenesa, 25 000 tonnes of Harare city's accumulated garbage was removed, with the large illegal dumps around the city eradicated.
At the same time, the Government allocated 52 of the tractors brought into the country under a special lease scheme run by a Belarus company to the Harare City Council, with 31 of these tractors handed over to the local authority before the end of the month.
The Government was able to intervene in the workings of a municipality, which is supposed to be largely independent of central Government, after President Mnangagwa declared Harare waste management a state of disaster, an accurate description made worse by the health threats during a cholera outbreak, with Harare Metropolitan the worst affected province.
The major clearance effort using the city council's depleted fleet of garbage trucks, the compactors, plus additional resources in the way of trucks and trailers from the Government and private sector, quickly cleared the accumulated filth of many months and in many areas restored the regular weekly collections for residential areas and daily collections for commercial areas.
Even more impressively, the weekly collections were restored by the end of Operation Chenesa to the days set by the city council as each suburb joined the list, at least to the end of the 1990s, and this apparent normality was appreciated by all.
The Government did not then just abandon the council.
It realised that the council had fallen behind in buying new garbage trucks, possibly because it had to buy luxury vehicles at the same price for its departmental heads, and the fleet was depleted. So it assigned 52 of the new Belarus tractors in the loan scheme run by Biston Agro Machinery.
This was not some pie in the sky, to be fulfilled later. Of that fleet, 31 were handed over on January 30 in a ceremony at Rufaro Stadium and were commissioned into the city fleet by Mayor Jacob Mafume, the third and final of the three CCC mayors that followed the August council elections last year. He is also the present mayor.
The other 21 tractors, the minority, would be coming later, but not that much later. In any case, the 31 already with the council would allow with careful direction most of the essential work, with the other areas needing tractors such as grass cutting deferred at least until the dry season.
But within weeks of Operation Chenesa, the huge informal and illegal garbage piles were being reformed, and garbage collection had sunk back into the sort of intermittent or non-existent service seen before the operation.
When the city council was queried over why this had happened, when emergency vehicles were brought into the city, it was reported that there were not enough trailers for the tractors to tow, or even any trailers. These are the far cheaper part of a tractor-trailer combination and the city council used to have a fleet.
In any case they are not very expensive and could have been bought or even borrowed.
Most importantly, the problem was collecting garbage, not giving excuses for non-collection.
Once again the Government is having to step in, using that same proclamation of a state of disaster, in Operation Chenesa 2 and the intervening three months have nullified the remarkable efforts made in January.
A second reason for the resumed major effort is that Zimbabwe hosts the next SADC Summit in a couple of months and wants the capital city to be at least functioning at that stage, with this noted by not just the Heads of State and Government, but also by the officials and media who will be congregating in the country.
A lot of work is being done so that everyone can see Zimbabwe is an advancing and functional country, not perfect, but certainly able to fix problems and run reasonably efficient services.
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And one of those services is the mundane garbage collection, something that was started in the 1890s by the original Salisbury Sanitary Board before there was even a municipality at the end of that decade and then carried out decade after decade for over a century with very little fuss and bother until the sudden near collapse in the last couple of decades.
In fact the new Geo-Pomona modern garbage dump is one of the projects that Heads of State will be invited to tour, as Harare is now a regional leader in coping with the collected garbage, even if the actual collection is problematic.
Obviously Operation Chenesa 2 will work, as the same people will be running it as fixed by the collection in January, but it is incredibly disappointing that the City of Harare needs these central Government interventions for its most basic functions, even after it gains access to the tools it needs for the job, those tractors.
