City Of Harare To Digitalise Operations To Reduce Corruption

City of Harare is planning on digitalising it’s operations as a way of fighting corruption through a Smart City Concept, Harare Mayor Jacob Mafume has said.

Mafume was delivering the State of the City address, Tuesday when he revealed Council’s plan to do away with the analogue system which is the root cause of corruption.

“We are going to increase our fights towards corruption, corruption is in two form we have corruption that people meet on day to day basis as they pay their licences, as they meet the traffic police as they try to go into a flea market , and as they try to do their day to day activities, we are going to introduce a Smart City Concept where most of these things have to be done from the centre and through a computerised system.

“We are going to remove human element in many of our activities, what has created the corruption has been the analogue manner that we are still handling our activities as council.

“If you are supposed to have a traffic fine you should get it from a computer, from a camera, from a place where you cannot be asked to pay a bribe or someone is interpreting your violation in a manner that allow them to have a discretion to make you pay a bribe.

“The best part of dealing with corruptions is to digitalise, we are going to digitalise many of our operations to avoid a situation where we have a human element,” he said.

Harare Mayor went on to say they are introducing a whistle blower system to report high level of corruption.

“In terms of high level of corruption, corruption in terms of deals that are happening in council, central government and in other offices that are high up we are going to create a whistle blower system which will allow us to receive reports and will be able to deal with high level corruption.

“We are also going to engage the central government in terms of how we are going into public and private partnership so that our partnerships  are done openly  and we will advertise , in that regard I have announce as a mayor we are going to revoke  all the partnerships that we have, all the partnerships that we have entered into many of them are not in the favour of council  so we are going to revoke each partnership one by one.

“Some of the partnership have gone on to donate land, to give tittle deeds to private actors and those types of deeds were given without a cent been paid to council. There have been taking advantage of the absent of the lawyers in the policy making frameworks I’m now there as a lawyer as Junior Councillor have said I’m a good lawyer as well so we are going to deal with some of the partnerships,” said Mafume.