The Second Republic has made sterling progress against corruption over the last six years.
This has been done through a broad assault on graft encompassing hunting down the corrupt and charging them, launching civil suits to strip people of property paid for through the proceeds of corruption, and setting up systems that make corruption difficult or impossible.
Generally speaking, corruption is now seen as indefensible and intolerable, rather than something "everybody does" with shoulder shrugging when it emerges.
So we have seen a major culture change as well, as people no longer sit back and just sigh, but are now using the hotlines, such as the one manned by the police, to report attempts to extort money from people who are paid to provide services. The legal changes over the Government procurement procedures sometimes irritate, with the split between listing who is allowed to tender for any Government contract and the issuing of tenders and their adjudication.
But this system makes it harder for briefcase companies and other dubious characters to even approach a department for a contract, and puts personal responsibility on the panel that adjudicates the final offers.
We have probably not eliminated corruption, or at least attempted corruption, at national level, but it has certainly been dramatically reduced and the odds of being caught are now considerably higher, even with the more sophisticated techniques used by those who wish to defraud the taxpayer. High profile cases show that no one is protected, and the dishonest, regardless of who they are related to, are arrested and appear in court.
So President Mnangagwa was standing on solid ground this week when he cracked the whip at the meeting of the Local Government Association attended by representatives of all 92 urban and rural district councils.
Much of what remains of corruption at the level of public officials is now within local government after the clean up at the central government levels.
From the cases still coming to court, corrupt practices still occur and are not hunted down until they become so obvious that some action has to be taken, and even then the action is not always effective.
The worst is Harare City Council, easily the largest local authority and in size only second to the central Government itself when it comes to assets and revenue. Harare is larger than any other public or private entity besides the national government.
While some of the councils' problems can be written off to mistakes without corrective action taken, or just sheer inefficiency, a fair number involve councillors and officials in active corrupt practices.
Very often people who should be taking action are seen just standing to one side and doing nothing, raising suspicions that they might have been stayed by some payment in cash or kind because no one could be that useless. Of course, one perennial problem with Harare is that it is difficult to figure out illegal activity because the city still does not have a proper accounting system required by a large local authority, relying instead on a system that is normally used by small and medium companies.
The Auditor-General has commented that this can make it impossible to track revenue and spending. When money cannot be accounted for, disappearing from records, no one can tell if it was there to start with or whether it disappeared in a legal payment or disappeared because someone stole it or made a payment to some entity that had bribed its way in.
If the accounts are short, then a lot of underhand activity can take place and no one can catch it, unless they hit a lucky break from another source.
The fact that there are some very recent cases involving Harare councillors and officials suggests that this underhand activity is taking place.
Even the purchase of a proper system is mired in controversy, the scalable system created by Harare Institute of Technology and vetted by international referees, being rejected in favour of a South African system at seven or more times the price.
From what has occasionally emerged into the public domain from council, one reason could be that setting up the South African deal involves trips on good levels of expenses to South Africa, while the HIT deal involves a 4km drive into Belvedere without even a free lunch.
The other aspect of the Presidential address was on the positive side, wanting councils to get moving and building up their services and providing a proper local administration.
Admittedly this does require a background of honesty as well as efficiency, so the money is available even for the poorest rural district council.
As President Mnangagwa pointed out, so much of what impacts the daily lives of people is provided or managed by local authorities, and they need to have their vision of a decent environment and better lives for their residents.
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We have been publishing a spate of stories recently as the devolution agenda moves up a few gears and becomes fully operational, with clinics and schools being opened in many districts and some councils now having a reasonable stock of devolution fund assets. So there has been progress.
Rural people tend to be more forward in both volunteering when improvements are wanted, and more demanding when it comes to accountability, but rural district councils are dealing with ever more complex programmes and so need to make sure that they maintain their general reputation for honesty.
The basis of what the President wants is present in all those households that make up each local government area, but there does need in many wards and councils, especially urban councils, far better contact between the councillors and officials on one hand, and the people who pay the rates and want better services on the other. And that means the authorities have to stop preying on their residents or even robbing them and start serving them.
