HARARE – After enduring years of neglect by Zanu PF aligned housing cooperatives and land developers, some residents in Harare’s Hatcliffe suburb have started pooling together resources to build critical infrastructure such as roads and water systems.

The residents from an area known as Hatcliffe Consortium in the sprawling suburb bought housing stands from cooperatives and land developers that were given the green light by the government to parcel out land before setting up onsite and offsite infrastructure.

An investigation earlier this month by ZimLive in partnership with the Information for Development Trust (IDT), a non-profit organisation supporting investigative journalism in Zimbabwe and southern Africa, exposed how the affected residents lack basic services such as electricity, water, sewer reticulation infrastructure and roads.

The over 4,000 households bought stands from Pilgrims Rest Housing Scheme led by Nyasha Chikwinya, who was once the Women Affairs, Gender and Development minister during the Mugabe era nearly two decades ago.

Chikwinya was also MP for Harare North constituency that included Hatcliffe, on a Zanu PF ticket for a long time and in 2005, she was the ruling party’s women’s league leader as well as a housing developer.

Others got their stands from land developers such as Alpha International Land Developers owned by controversial businessman Jonathan Gapare and Divine Homes, which is linked to businessman Nhamo Tutisani.

After the government embarked on Operation Murambatsvina in 2005 to ostensibly clear urban areas of illegal structures and displaced over 750,000 people, the government allowed urban councils to sell unserviced housing stands to meet the ballooning demand for shelter.

Opened floodgates

The new policy that was preceded by Operation Garikai (Better Life) opened floodgates for land developers and housing cooperatives with links to the ruling party to parcel out land in unplanned settlements such as Hatcliffe Consortium that are now bearing the brunt of lack of basic amenities.

Jerimos Chigome, the leader of Premier Park Residents Association in the Hatcliffe Consortium area, said homeowners were being forced to pay for infrastructure development because they were tired of the deplorable living conditions in the suburb.

“Residents are now paying for development projects because land developers have not been responsive,” Chigome told ZimLive.

“Some have pooled together resources to drill boreholes in the community since there is no running water at their homes.

“The residents are also working together to ensure that there is electricity infrastructure and thanks to their efforts, three quarters of the area where people bought 400 square metre housing stands from Pilgrims Rest is now electrified.”

He, however, said residents who bought housing stands from Gapare’s Alpha International Land Developers were struggling to get their properties electrified because the developer is failing to provide a map with the Surveyor General’s stamp.

“As of June last year, Gapare had not filed the final map for the Surveyor General’s approval and this is frustrating residents’ efforts to establish power infrastructure because ZESA wants a development fee payment, a statement of ownership from the government and a letter of consent,” Chigome said.

He said residents still needed support for infrastructure, which required a lot of investment such as roads and sewer systems.

The only road development done in Hatcliffe Consortium was carried out by losing Zanu PF Hatcliffe constituency candidate in the August 2023 elections Tongesai Mudambu, who put gravel on a 3 km stretch of the main road where Alpha International Land Developers sold its stands.

Land barons menace

Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA) programmes officer Rueben Akili, while acknowledging efforts by the residents to improve infrastructure in their neighbourhoods, said the issue of irregular settlements in Harare needed a sustainable solution.

Akili urged Harare City Council to be tough with land barons and land developers that use their political ties to evade responsibility such as ensuring that there is onsite and offsite infrastructure where they establish new settlements.

“One of the greatest challenges that we have seen amongst land barons is that most of them are politically connected and some of them are in local authorities,” he said.

“It’s very important to note that these politically connected land barons end up fleecing residents of their money and sometimes they make some demands around administration fees and other sorts of things such as security where they purport residents won’t be ejected from the stands they have been allocated.

“These are illegal activities, but at the end of the day these people also resort to name-dropping so that they can be spared from the wrath of the law.”

Akili said unscrupulous land developers and land barons had a tendency to abuse provisions of the Regional Town Planning Act that make it easy to regularise illegal settlements without providing the necessary infrastructure.

“From an association point of view, we continue to create platforms for engagements between residents and city officials, but we also recommend that the local authority must be proactive and not treat land barons with kid gloves,” he added.

“As CHRA, we are ready to work with these people so that they can have that rapport with the local authority because the major challenge, which they have is that they do not have title deeds and probably some of the land where they were settled is in wetlands.”

Regularising settlements

Gabriel Masvora, the Local Government and Public Works ministry spokesperson, previously told ZimLive that Hatcliffe Consortium was one of the irregular settlements that would soon be regularised to deal with the multiple service delivery problems faced by residents in such areas.

Masvora insisted that regularisation was the only solution when asked about the government’s position on residents that are being forced to fund infrastructure development because of neglect by errant land developers.

“There is a need to regularise these settlements,” he said.

Vincent Chakunda, a local governance expert from the Midlands State University, said lack of infrastructure in irregular settlements around urban areas was a national problem that needed a holistic approach.

Chakunda said the problems were exacerbated by a 2004 housing development plan by the government that sought to accelerate housing delivery in urban areas that relied on private players with little oversight.

“My thinking is that we really need to commission a comprehensive and scientific research by government to look into the nature and extent of the problem over and above the work that was done by the Justice Uchena Commission,” he said.

“We can then look at the cases and juxtapose them against existing capacities of urban strategic infrastructure to accommodate these new settlements, which will then bring us to invest strategically in the infrastructure that we are talking about so as to accommodate these new settlements.

“For now, the government and local authorities may need to agree to stop any other new development that will put pressure and strain the existing urban infrastructure, otherwise we will have a crisis.

“For Hatcliffe, it’s one of the cases where government should look into these cases and make an appropriate decision which also culminates in strategic investment to grow the capacity of water and capacity of sewer as strategic services.”

The Commission of Inquiry into the Matter of Sale of State Land in and around Urban Areas Since 2005 led by Justice Tendai Uchena presented its final report to President Emmerson Mnangagwa in December 2019.

It revealed that land developers, housing cooperatives leaders and politically-connected people illegally sold US$3 billion worth of urban state land to create unregulated settlements.

Justice Uchena’s commission also concluded that both land developers and the State controlled Urban Development Corporation (UDCORP) were incapable of solving the housing crisis in most irregular settlements, including Hatcliffe Consortium.

In 2016, the government tasked UDCORP with cleaning the mess in Hatcliffe after being flooded with complaints from residents about land barons and cooperatives that were fleecing them without providing services, but the intervention did not yield anything tangible.