Bulawayo, (New Ziana) -The City of Bulawayo plans to enhance its collaboration with the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality of South Africa, focusing on shared development strategies and policy exchanges to improve service delivery for residents.
The move follows a recent visit to Bulawayo by the eThekwini Municipality Head of Business Support, Tourism and Markets Unit Thulani Nzama.
The eThekwini Municipality is a metropolitan municipality, created in 2000, that includes the city of Durban and surrounding towns.
It is one of the 11 districts of the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa and as of 2011, the majority of its 3 442 361 inhabitants spoke isiZulu.
Bulawayo and the eThekwani Metropolitan Municipality established a twinning arrangement in 2002 to enable both local authorities to cooperate on governance matters.
The eThekwini Municipality has benefited from its twinning arrangement with the City of Bulawayo through the council`s Call Centre and the Kelvin Industries factory shells, and during his visit, Nzama toured various entities to learn how they can integrate some of the ideas back home.
He visited the City of Bulawayo’s Aishelby Hall, Good Hope farm, Ingwebu Breweries, the Bulawayo SME Centre and the council`s Dugmore Informal Trading offices, which are undergoing renovations to cater for players in the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), which the eThekwini Municipality wants to increase co-operation with Bulawayo on their development to address growing informality in the two local authorities.
Speaking after touring the facilities, Nzamba said his city is committed to sharing knowledge and policy guidelines with the Bulawayo City Council on improving service delivery and the wellbeing of residents, adding he had observed some common issues and challenges around the growth of the informal economy in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
“I have engaged council officials on where we can forge relationships. I have also observed common issues and challenges around the growth of the informal economy, whether within Zimbabwe or within South Africa created by a lot of challenges around unemployment,” he said.
Nzama also said the informality was causing unfair competition and they had discussed ideas that would help come up with policies to deal with such matters.
“Going forward we will be forming areas of collaboration and we will be sharing our policies,” he added.
Nzama said the Bulawayo City Council showed keen interest in learning how his municipality was collecting revenue from MSMEs as well as how it was providing infrastructure for them.
The development comes at a time when provinces in the Matabeleland region have formed a cross border partnership with those in the Limpopo region of South Africa.
Known as the Trans-Limpopo Special Economic Development Initiative, it is led by the Ministers of Provincial Affairs and Devolution for all provinces in region, and expects to leverage on it to attract investment, boost trade, and revive the local economy.
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