The decision by Harare City Council to demolish more than 5 000 houses built illegally is a sign of total failure to manage land allocations and enforcement of planning and building laws for almost a quarter century.
Now council wants those in these 5 000 houses to pay the cost of its failure and so Minister of Local Government and Public Works Daniel Garwe is on solid ground when he says the Government will not allow demolitions to proceed under the blanket ban now in place on demolitions.
The time to have stopped the building of the houses was when it started, as the foundation trenches were being dug and it became obvious, or at least should have become obvious if the council and its staff were doing their job, that something illegal was in progress.
There was a time, right up to the beginning of this century, when illegal building was quashed at the first sign, and someone building without following proper procedures on private land they had bought or public land that had been officially allocated had their efforts stopped before any serious damage was done or money spent.
As a consequence hardly anyone even built a garage, let alone a house, without going through all the stages laid down by law since the threat of bulldozers was real.
There are at least five steps that the council is supposed to pass when a house is being built. Before any work starts, and this is on a house or an extension, building plans have to be approved, a straight forward requirement to make sure the resulting structure is safe and that the relevant planning rules are followed.
Automatically plans submitted for approval need to be for a legal stand.
So when council workers, or even the local councillor, sees someone digging foundations anywhere, on legal or illegal ground, they can demand to know when the plans were approved. That is the first chance to stop building.
Council building inspectors have four inspections to make: the completion of the foundations, when the walls reach what is called the "wall-plate" stage, that is after the lintels over windows and doors are done, and then the roof. The fourth inspection is a plumbing inspection to make sure that the main drain connection is done properly.
Again council workers should be on the prowl, or at least keeping a lookout, and checking that the inspections are being done.
This stops houses falling down and killing people, if nothing else. So when someone manages to finish a house that was never approved we can wonder why the council failed.
One reason over the last 20 or so years has been the levels of corruption within the council, among both councillors and officials.
The clean-up process, which has seen former officials all the way to head of department going to jail, where they can share a prison yard with former councillors, shows how little effort was put into trying to keep everything legal.
We all know land barons took over large tracts of State land, sometimes via corrupt housing cooperatives and at least following outline plans, hence the regularisation now taking place under the Government's title deed schemes, but sometimes just moving onto vacant land and taking it over.
Council argues that some of this vacant land was assigned to public purposes such as schools, clinics, sports and recreation, and some was also wetland not suitable for building and so often assigned for recreation purposes. These are strong arguments for keeping the land away from builders and not creating plots, as the land barons did.
If the council had moved promptly in each case, bringing in the police as soon as the land was invaded and bringing in the bulldozers, while people were starting to dig foundations, most people would applaud the council for doing its work. Instead it waited until people had built the houses.
In these cases there should be no argument as they can be over allocations via a corrupt cooperative. In these cases there should have been no land to alienate, although the creation of extra stands by some corrupt officials, as has been laid out in criminal trials, has muddied the waters.
The whole culture of corruption and acquiescence, as the Commission of Inquiry into the council is hearing, allowed many problems to get ever worse. The council has failed by doing nothing and so allowing the land barons to sell off the land, often under fake offer letters or other fake documents created by corrupt officials.
Now we need to clean up the mess, and simply driving bulldozers across swathes of completed housing is not the right answer, as Minister Garwe has spelt out.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
There needs to be discussions now, between the Government, the council and the home owners over what can be done. Regularisation might be an option, at least in some cases, if other suitable land can be allocated for schools and the like. The home owners might have to help buy that land in a swop arrangement.
In almost all cases those who persuaded people to pay them for the land need to be hunted down and forced to pay the damages and accept the financial costs of their criminal actions.
This is important when in some cases people will have to move.
The Government did, with the mess on the Marimba flood plain in Budiriro, move those whose houses simply could not remain to Dzivaresekwa flats, and similar arrangements may have to be made for others.
Critically council needs to distinguish between when it has done its job properly and can block building as soon as it starts on illegal plots, and when it does not do its work and so in practical terms acquiesces in the new buildings by letting them be completed and then occupied.
Wringing its hands some months or some years later is not the solution for its corruption, negligence or simple incompetence.
