Parly committee grills City Parking boss
CITY Parking, a business unit owned by Harare City Council and is responsible for vehicle parking, is a private company and is not governed by the Public Finance Management Act, the company’s managing director, Mr Simon Muzviyo argued when he appeared before the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee on Monday.
The company was flagged by the then Auditor General Mrs Mildred Chiri in her 2021 and 2022 reports for refusing to submit its financial statements for audit.
He did, however, concur that where the private entity is owned by a public entity, that public entity, in the City Parking case the Harare City Council, would account for the activities of the private entity.
“We do not deny that we are liable to scrutiny, hence our presence here, but it is through the shareholder,” Mr Muzviyo said.
But he warned that if the council took over, City Parking would not survive. “While this is controversial, council used to manage parking on its own and experienced losses due to inefficiencies, to the extent that the parking account was in the red and had to be subsidised by the other accounts like rates and water.”
Legislators questioned why there were complaints from the public over the absence of parking marshals on bays.
“There has been a lot of outcry from the motoring public which started from February 2023, that is when we were assigned and delegated enforcement powers,” Mr Muzviyo said.
“From the strategies we have done, we have a customer complaints analysis, but there is a decline in terms of the number of complaints.
“We have developed a number of solutions that do not include parking marshals, for example issuance of a QR code to scan and buy your parking [disc] in the absence of a marshal.”
Explaining his position further, Mr Muzviyo said: “The Act ( Public Finance Management Act), with all due respect does not cover local authorities but we borrow from it. We recently adopted our own corporate governance handbook which borrows heavily from international best practices and also that Act, though it does not cover us, it has very pertinent provisions on corporate governance,” he said.
PAC chairperson, Mr Charlton Hwende accused the company of violating the country’s law, adding that the council and it’s subsidiaries were hiding information from authorities.
“It appears there is deliberate hiding of information on subsidiaries to the auditors and also to ratepayers. We had to write several letters for us to get the payroll.
“We take great exception when the Auditor General performing a constitutional mandate comes to audit and you have audited statements but you do not submit to the Auditor General,” Mr Hwende said.
Buhera West MP Cde Tafadzwa Mugwadi also slammed the city council and its companies of undermining the authority of Parliament.
“You come here and say the Act does explicitly mention your company. It’s an attempt to undermine this august House. What takes supremacy, your handbook or what this House stands for?”
During his questioning, Harare Town Clerk Eng Chisango acknowledged that City Parking was performing well and council was now getting revenue unlike when council used to manage parking.