EDSON PAUL MUTEMA

The paper seeks to examine and unpack the factors that are militating against councilor oversight at Nkayi Rural District Council. Councilor oversight is a crucial function for promoting and enhancing transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in Zimbabwean local authorities. Despite the existence of councilor oversight, local authorities in Zimbabwe continue to face operational, regulatory and oversight challenges. To establish the factors militating against effective councilor oversight at Nkayi, the respondents were purposively selected and the research used both primary and secondary data. The study established that low academic qualifications among councilors, councilors terms of office, political affiliation and partisanship and limited timeframes as the key impediments to effective councilor oversight at Nkayi Rural District Council.

Corruption is acknowledged as one of the greatest challenges affecting urban councils in Zimbabwe. It is common to open a newspaper and discover a story highlighting the ethical violations and corrupt activities of urban council officials. The prevalence of corruption in Zimbabwe’s urban local authorities is considered in this study as the litmus test on the capacity of the existing ethics architecture to fight corruption. Ethics architecture refers to systems and structures in the form of a set of rules, institutions and practices designed by urban local authorities to promote ethical conduct against corruption. This study sought to evaluate the performance of the ethics architecture of urban councils in Zimbabwe and to propose relevant policy and institutional improvements. The study is situated within teleological, deontological and virtue ethics theories and argues that one cannot exist in isolation and should be unified to underpin the study. Analysed through the lens of a th...

This paper debates the implications of the Urban Councils Act (UCA) on the practice of good corporate governance in Zimbabwean urban local authorities. The study revealed that the act upholds corporate governance in urban councils through providing for: council meetings that are open to the public and the press, council minutes which are available for public inspection and a municipal procurement board that manages the tender system of urban councils just to mention a few. However the study also revealed that despite these positive implications the act is counterproductive to the practice of good corporate governance. The UCA is silent on the minimum academic qualifications for one to be a councilor. The act bestows excessive powers to the Minister of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development which creates an environment where central government dominates in the affairs of urban local authorities. The findings of this study have implications that assist in crafting an effective legal instrument critical in developing a sound corporate governance system for urban local authorities.