Bulawayo (New Ziana) -Financial institutions should avail long term loans with low interest rates to local authorities to enable them to procure new equipment for improving service delivery, an official said on Monday.
Bulawayo mayor Solomon Mguni said this during the commissioning of state-of-the-art equipment and motor vehicles which the council acquired recently.
The equipment, worth over US$1 million, includes one CAT grader, one CAT excavator, a CAT front-end loader, four BT 50 Mazda trucks and five Nissan NP 200 vehicles.
“This plant equipment will be key in ensuring that we achieve our mandate to deliver quality services. These various machines and equipment we are commissioning today is set to improve our performance to satisfactory levels,” he said.
“To achieve this, we call on financial institutions to provide necessary funding through long term loans at affordable rates.”
Mguni said the current hyper inflationary environment was making it difficult for the city to raise capital funding to purchase equipment and he called for partnership between banks and local authorities to ensure necessary funding is availed for that purpose.
“To ensure continued service delivery, we had to depend on hiring equipment, and this has been costly for the city and residents,” he said.
Availability of the equipment will ensure timeous rehabilitation and maintenance of infrastructure in the city, whose major challenge like other local authorities, was lack of financing for infrastructure needs.
Mguni also urged residents and government agencies to timeously pay their bills to enable council to purchase equipment and improve service delivery.
His purchasing of key road maintenance equipment such as graders would enhance road rehabilitation and estate development.
In line with its vision of being a smart and transformative city by 2024, Bulawayo will continue to strive towards improvement of service delivery, said Mguni, adding more new equipment was on its way.
Mguni also underscored the need for early disbursement of devolution funds by Treasury to ensure the local authority can fund capital projects and buy more equipment before they are eroded by inflation.
New Ziana
