Marondera council revenues fall sharply

Marondera (New Ziana) – The outbreak of Covid-19 has hit the Marondera Municipality hard financially, reducing its daily average revenue collections from $110 000 to just $10 000 now, a top official of the council has said.

Marondera mayor, councillor Chengetai Murova confirmed the sharp downturn in the council’s financial fortunes in an interface meeting with the media and representatives of informal traders.

The meeting was called to compare notes on how the lockdown had affected various sectors in the town, particularly informal traders.

The mayor said the council had also been terribly affected revenue wise by the lockdown, with inflows now just a trickle of pre-Covid-19 levels.

“As council, we have not been spared by this enforced national lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Before the lockdown, we were not financially stable, but at least we would manage to collect reasonable amounts on a daily basis from the residents and other ratepayers.

“We would collect, on average, ZWL$110 000 on a daily basis, but our daily collections have since gone down to ZWL$10 000 per day. This, to a certain extent, is due to the fact that most of our ratepayers had their revenue streams closed while others are simply not allowed to move as per the lockdown restrictions,” he said.

As a result of the financial squeeze, Murova said council had since sent the majority of its contract workers on forced leave as there was no money to pay them.

“This sad dip in our revenue collection is making us fail to meet some of our obligations and as we speak, we resolved to send some of our workers on leave. Only essential staff is coming to work,” he said.

New Ziana