While Harare City Council grabs the headlines when it comes to mismanagement, poor accounting systems and arrests for corruption-relation activities, it appears that there are weaknesses throughout the local government accounting system.
The 2023 report on local authorities by Acting Auditor General Mrs Rhea Kujinga submitted to Parliament this month makes it clear that the problems are getting worse, rather than governance getting better, and that is worrying.
Some of the problems are related to the extra work required in every council, as development increases, as residents seek more and better services. This means every council has to be able to handle increasing requirements and increasing revenue, and that means for a start adequate accounting systems, plus councils and their senior officials becoming determined to follow the correct procurement procedures.
This will still mean there could be bad decisions quite legally made, but these will, if the rest is in place, be seen as bad far earlier, when corrective action can be taken at fairly low cost and before much damage is done.
While councillors, from the city councillors in Harare to the councillors in the smallest rural district council or the smallest independent urban local board, are all part-time amateurs doing the job, we hope, because they want to give something back to their community, they are supposed to be backed by professional full-time staff.
When the arrangement works, it can work well, with the councillors reflecting the will of the majority of their communities and the professionals running an efficient administration and able to generate options that come as close as possible to what the councillors want, so the final decision makes sense, is legal and can be managed.
Very often this does not happen. Again Harare is the worst case, where a respectable slice of the officials are on suspension after being arrested, with Chitungwiza showing almost a serious problem. But Mrs Kujinga brings up examples of other bad decisions, sometimes because procurement rules have been breached, sometimes through sheer inefficiency.
The complication of an ambulance in Gweru was highlighted, an attempt to buy a cheaper ambulance ending up with a lot of extra costs and still no ambulance.
Gweru also had some very sloppy record keeping over purchases of assets. Here, we have officials who badly advised councillors and who are simply not doing their job.
A combination of poor councillors, ones not really up to the position and not really giving all they have, coupled with inefficient administrators and we run into trouble.
One problem Mrs Kujinga highlighted was the use of financial and accounting systems that are nowhere near the sort of systems that equivalent-sized businesses would regard as normal and necessary. She appeared surprised at the extent of manual systems and manual filing of documents, which can be done badly as documents are lost, and the like.
Harare needs a proper exceptionally high-level accounting system, as the largest entity in Zimbabwe after central Government itself. After dumping its ideal system three years ago, it is now spending US$2,6 million to have it reinstalled, still a bargain considering an alternative was quoted at US$52 million.
Most rural district councils and the smaller urban authorities could probably afford a respectable system, but probably do not have the expertise to assess a tender, and there is the danger that a vast range of systems would be quite pricey, since setting something up uniquely for a small council would need special efforts.
What could be a good solution would be a combined tender, probably floated via the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works, for a system that could be fitted into almost any rural district council or smaller urban council.
This would also make joint training programmes possible, again cutting costs while boosting efficiency.
The systems would need to be able to handle dispersed offices, and very often using radio based links rather than the cabling that something like Harare or other cities would see as normal, so designers need to be able to compress and group data for intermittent connections to keep costs down.
There are other considerations but with a majority of the 92 councils all going for the same system it would be fairly easy to design something largely using off-the-shelf software that would do the job efficiently and would be affordable and expandable.
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This would allow the central administration of each council to know, almost instantly, who was paying due rates and fees, and who was behind, would allow good billing, would allow the council to see its financial position in real time, and would, as good by-product, allow the annual audit to proceed at some speed.
At the same time it appears that there might well be a need to upgrade staff with better training, and continuous training.
Mrs Kujinga sees one major value of an audit as the follow-up, an audit officer sitting down with administrators and councillors and going through the detailed report, pointing out mistakes and weaknesses so these could be fixed. This is often not possible if accounts are late and incomplete.
The Auditor General can lay out the weaknesses and suggest approaches that will lead to solutions, but that still means someone has to take action.
In theory this is the councils, although not all are equipped to do so alone, so combining common needs, setting up suitable systems, arranging common training for staff and councillors and other co-operation will lead to better administration, and more useful audits.
