The Commission of Inquiry into the governance of the affairs of the Harare City Council since 2017 has now finished taking oral evidence, although people can still send in written affidavits, and will now be sifting the large quantity of evidence it has gathered, checking facts, drawing conclusions and making recommendations.
It has had its term extended again, so it has the three months that will be needed to first tie down and make sense of all the evidence and then go for the harder job of working out how to fix the mess.
When President Mnangagwa set up the commission last year, with retired judge Justice Maphios Cheda chairing a group of legal and local government experts, he was using his powers under the Commission of Inquiry Act because he and the country, and the residents of Harare in particular, wanted to know what had gone wrong, why it had gone wrong and what needed to be done to put the city back on course.
Besides the general instructions to the commission, the President was keen to know what the swathe of private companies totally owned by the city council were doing; these include City Parking with its vast daily flow of revenue, Rufaro Marketing which is now a property company having ceased running beerhalls and bars, and the quarrying company that used to supply the stone for repairing and making roads.
The President was also keen to find out why the second largest entity in Zimbabwe after the central Government, and far larger than any private sector company, was using a financial system designed for small and medium businesses rather than a state-of-the-art enterprise resource planning system, with the Auditor General reports pressing the council to resume such a system after noting that large sums could simply not be accounted for.
All local authorities have to comply with the same laws of accounting of revenue and procurement as the Government and other public bodies.
While the public hearings have seen a large number of allegations, with those called being invited to reply to allegations made against them and with trained lawyers asking questions as specific evidence was sought, the commission now needs to sort out just what was going on and how the strands of evidence are linked.
The commission is probably helped by the fact that many of those called were anxious to blame almost everybody else for the mess in the administration and the council, while making it clear that they themselves had just been doing their job and in some cases had opposed what was happening.
This sort of finger pointing often produced floods of information that allowed the commission to call in other witnesses and to build up the sort of precise questions it wanted to ask people like the acting town clerk and the mayor.
Mayor Councillor Jacob Mafume was in fact the last witness summoned by the commission, and his questioning was probably the longest, as by that stage a lot of detail had emerged and the commission wanted confirmation of some facts and explanations of others.
Clr Mafume was also keen to note that a wide range of events had taken place before he became mayor and he had been unable to reverse them.
We assume the commission may well want to confirm certain allegations, such as the claim by Clr Mafume that top executives were receiving a combined US$500 000 a month with the town clerk on a salary of US$27 000, rising to US$30 000 a month on additional perks.
The oddity is that this sort of pay was probably justified on the need to attract and retain top talent to run the city and that if it was not paid then the top executives would go elsewhere.
There are many residents who might query why the council was so keen to retain executives who had done so little in the way of their duties.
Mayor Mafume also brought up the problem, as several of his predecessors coming from the same opposition ranks have done before, that hardly any councillors have a professional, business or accounting background, with the chairperson of the audit committee, for example, having zero accounting qualifications.
With the technical background of commissioners, under a highly experienced judge with years of experience in sifting through complex evidence to find the truth, we are confident that the commission will be able to eventually lay bare the details of the mess and the degree of the disaster in the City of Harare, and just that will make its report a best seller.
The next stage will be what has to be done to put Harare City Council and its administration back on its feet.
Part of the problem is the degree of autonomy that all local authorities, but in particular those with municipal status, have.
A former temporary solution of an appointed commission to run the affairs of a city no longer exists.
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But solutions are needed, perhaps using the Local Government Board for a start to find and appoint a top layer of leadership in the administration, rather than have almost everyone on suspension or acting.
Certainly the competence of some of those in top jobs can be strongly questioned and replacement thus legally easier.
The complication of a succession of councils where hardly anyone has the sort of background to oversee the running of a major city is a harder problem, since the solution relies on voters insisting that people have to be qualified as a councillor before seeking power.
The city has faced very serious financial and other problems before when either the council or its administration failed badly, although the dual failure we see now is very rare, fortunately.
Yet there are probably a lot of council employees who know what they are doing and given reasonable leadership and resources would be able to provide excellent service, so it is not a total disaster.
The need is to provide that leadership in administration and on council and then get the resources, which exist, put to the correct use rather than filling five-star troughs for those who see the city as a source of wealth.
