Source: AG exposes deep rot in councils – The Standard
A recent report by the acting auditor general, tabled in Parliament, has uncovered ongoing and widespread service delivery failures across Zimbabwe’s local authorities.
The audit highlights critical gaps in infrastructure development — particularly in rapidly expanding urban areas — and a troubling lack of progress in resolving long-standing audit issues.
The report details 23 service delivery deficiencies, with a sharp focus on the failure of local authorities to upgrade essential infrastructure such as water, sewerage, and waste management systems to match urban growth.
“Many local authorities are experiencing population and spatial growth, but unfortunately, basic services have not expanded to match this development,” Kujinga noted.
In a follow-up on previous audit reports from 2019 to 2023, the auditor general reviewed 639 outstanding audit findings.
Of these, only 195 were fully addressed, while 83 were partially resolved.
A staggering 361 issues remained completely unaddressed.
“In the current year, nine local authorities had not submitted financial statements for 2023 and 2024 compared to eighteen (18) local authorities (24%) which had arrears of two years (2022 and 2023) in the prior year,” the report read.
“These local authorities need to be monitored by the relevant stakeholders as their lagging behind will affect full IPSAS implementation.
“Late submission of financial statements creates gaps in accountability and this has resulted in most of the local authorities not being able to avail supporting documents and reconciling variances noted during the audit.”
The audit covered aspects of governance, revenue collection and debt recovery, management of assets, procurement of goods and services, employment costs and service delivery.
Revenue collection issues rose from 81 findings in 51 authorities to 92 in 60 authorities. Most lack modern billing systems, relying on cash-based accounting instead of accruals, leading to unbilled revenue, incomplete databases, and unexplained variances.
Most of the local authorities did not have enterprise resource planning systems to manage their revenue collection processes prompting most of them to account for revenue on cash basis instead of accruals basis.
“As a result, Local Authorities are losing revenue due to the absence of complete/ updated databases for their various revenue streams,” the report read.
“I noted instances of non-billing of revenue and unresolved variances between the revenue records and the reported figures in the financial statements.
“Most councils were recognising revenue on cash basis because of not billing customers therefore their receivables were incomplete.
“The resultant liquidity challenges have continued to compromise implementation of programmes and the improvement of service delivery.”
According to the report, the majority of Local Authorities did not maintain comprehensive asset registers which would have enabled accountability of public assets.
“In addition, local authorities’ assets were not revalued to reflect fair values at the reporting date as required by the reporting frameworks,” read the report.
“Local authorities cited lack of financial resources as one of the reasons why they were not able to carry out asset revaluations.
“I reported 24 issues for 18 local authorities in respect of procurement of goods and services, there were instances of unsupported expenditure on the procurement of goods.
At least 12 local authorities were said to have procured goods and services that were yet to be delivered.
“The goods not delivered ranges from ambulances, front-end loaders, pickup trucks, fire tenders which are key in the operation of Local Authorities and service delivery,” read the report.
She said Gweru City Council could not avail procurement supporting documents for expenditure amounting to ZWL$883 million (2021: ZWL$155 million).
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