EDITORIAL COMMENT
Hundreds of people in Harare are set to lose their homes and businesses as the city council begins to demolish residential and business structures built on undesignated land.
Homes constructed on wetlands and/or other undesignated areas in many suburbs around the city will be pulled down beginning this week, while business premises and other structures situated along highways and other places deemed illegal by the local authorities will also be destroyed.
The exercise will no doubt cost struggling residents many thousands of hard-earned dollars and livelihoods will be destroyed. This painful process has happened many times before and every time that it happens, the “culprits” and “victims” accuse each other of “heartlessness” and “stubborn arrogance”.
Ultimately however, the losers are the residents whose sweat, time and money would have been swept down the drain. There have been hardly any cases where the authorities have compensated anybody as it always turns out that the residents would have broken the law by putting up structures without permission.
Local authorities are indeed guilty of sleeping on the job and doing nothing as corrupt councillors, crooks and land thieves parcel out council land to unsuspecting land seekers. The municipalities then sit and watch as the people go about the construction of houses at huge cost, waiting for them to complete whole suburbs before descending on them with caterpillars to raze their money and effort to the ground.
But it is not like the people would be unaware of the processes of acquiring residential stands and the consequences of disregarding the law. It may be desperation or the land barons’ sweet talk that drives people into making such thoughtless and reckless decisions with their life savings, but the fact that the demolitions happen and are publicised widely every year, should alert people against this kind of folly.
The courts have many times publicly dealt with cases of houses built on stands that were demarcated in undesignated areas and have in the majority of cases ruled that the houses be demolished. But every time, even before the dust has settled, another lot of people will be pouring money down the drain in the same manner.
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But, while the buck stops with the individual that pays money to crooks who do not own land, we also place blame on local authorities that fail to enforce their own by-laws, resulting in thieves, some of them senior employees of council, going about pegging stands under electricity pylons, on top of main sewer lines and on wetlands.
The local authorities must take responsibility. It would dissuade them from this ineptitude if they were made to compensate the people that end up losing their houses. While it is well to restore sanity in cities by ordering the demolitions, the law should also stand up against this irresponsible behaviour by local authorities. The least that the authorities should do is to allocate proper, lawful stands to the people that would have lost their houses.
The point here is that councils should not watch and do nothing as houses go up in undesignated areas, only to stand up when the houses are completed, to demolish them. That is cruel and criminal.
