In the back of the shopping centre where I work, piles of rubbish like this are unfortunately common. Along the streets and verges, tins and take away boxes pile up. The rubbish bins along the sidewalks are full to overflowing, and more and more people just drop their litter on the pavement. The build up of rubbish isn’t surprising; the City of Harare hasn’t conducted regular rubbish collection in months. More and more people I speak with are refusing to pay the refuse collection portion of their City bills – why pay for something you don’t receive?

So when we saw a flyer for The Garbage Guys, offering a prompt refuse removal service, we decided to get in touch with them and see if they could pick up where the City of Harare has left off. They came by yesterday to have a look, and seemed to think a shopping centre clean up might be something they could do, but they needed some time to plan their approach.

I have my reservations, not about them but about the principle of it. Increasingly, those individuals and communities who can afford to are contracting businesses to deliver where public service is failing – fundraising to buy their own cables and ferry ZESA to fix electrical faults; drilling boreholes or buying bowsers of water to fill their tanks where municipal water hasn’t flowed for months. It’s an understandable response to both a complete failure of local and national government services, and the non-responsiveness of these same authorities to demands that they improve their standards. And it has parallels in other parts of Harare, and elsewhere.  Where public services fail, private initiatives step in to cover the gaps.

And of course there are different models, some more community-based, and others more like standard businesses. But I am worried about how this effective privatisation impacts things down the line. Those communities who can afford it sort themselves out. Those who don’t are left to live with sewage flowing down the streets, and mountains of rubbish along the roads. I know our “inclusive government” can’t meet all the challenges it’s facing, at least not just yet. The Zimbabwe Independent’s lead story to day is Govt urgently needs US$1b as fuel, electricity debts mount. The USD 14 I refuse to pay for rubbish collection that doesn’t happen is a tiny drop in that bucket. But how does not even expecting, or asking, the government to cover the basics now – and therefore withdrawing payment from public spaces and diverting them to private companies – effect all of us later.

This entry was posted on March 13th, 2009 at 9:12 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.