Harare City Council once again faces a civil legal challenge in the High Court over its public parking policies and charges in the city centre and surrounding areas, and the judge who hears that case when it eventually rises to the top of the civil roll, will apply the law, and decide if the by-laws and charges are legal.
But that is only a small part of the story, the rest being something outside the ambit of the courts, starting with the basic policies, the way the city council sets the rates, the uses it puts the money towards, and the general effects that the whole system has on business in the central business district.
To a large extent, while the judge can map what is happening against the enabling laws, there are limits to what a judge can do when it comes to the fairness or lack of fairness of the whole policy and system, since this should be decided by the city council which has the legislative and executive functions for local government in the city.
To be fair to the city council and its commercial subsidiary, City Parking, which actually applies the council's parking policies, a lot of problems have been sorted out, but at great cost both to those who wish to park in the environs of the city centre and in how this has affected businesses and others who make their living in the city centre.
Much of the illegal parking, the extortion rackets that used to sell parking, the high levels of congestion arising from people seeking parking and the like have been substantially ameliorated.
It is now generally easy to find a parking bay near where you want to park, and to make just one payment, this time to City Parking.
There are a lot of other factors, including the charges for removing a clamp if you exceed the time you have paid for, that are being challenged, but we think it is also time that the city council put together a review of the system and how the whole City Parking set up operates.
It is fairly obvious that the council regards City Parking as a cash cow, even though audited accounts from that commercial enterprise are basically impossible to obtain.
We even had to hear in a press release that the council is using the parking profits to renovate Rufaro Stadium, which really has zero to do with parking. But that shows that the council sees the parking company as a major source of revenue for almost anything.
Rufaro Stadium was originally built with profits from the council's beer monopoly in the high density suburbs, a monopoly that collapsed after independence when 90 years of colonial legal and administrative controls on "native drinking" automatically vanished when indigenous residents of the city were no longer discriminated against.
So using the parking money is not totally outlandish, but does tend to negate just what parking charges are supposed to pay for. Parking charges were introduced in the 1950s, very cheap or even free for four car parks, with the first batches of parking meters introduced to ration parking fairly in the very centre of the city centre.
Unfenced and untarred car parks were free, while tarred carparks had miniscule fees. Parking meters were less than US5c an hour, the money from all charges going on paying for the tar and the meters, over several years, and the person with the keys who walked down the line of parking meters emptying the money chamber one or twice a day.
During the 1960s the meter belt spread, and higher charges were put in place on meters around First Street Mall.
Any profits had to go into the parking fund, to pay for more parking space. During the 1970s this fund had enough money to build at each end of the decade a major parking garage, the only two with City Parking to this day. This saw the conversion of two car parks to parkades. By the end of the century parking was tight, and early this century there was a collapse with the new council at that time allowing touts to start taking over almost all parking in the city centre.
City Parking, originally an outside company with a franchise, came in and order was eventually restored, with parking charges then pushed up rapidly as the council started milking drivers.
This same double set of change killed the city centre as the upper-end commercial centre of Harare. Many concerns that needed office space fled to the suburbs, helping create those large office parks and the strip commercial development that saw residential properties along the main roads converted to commercial concerns, with on site parking. The result has been the conversion of the city centre into a huge market of small businesses, whose owners and staff do not drive in and park, and few of whose customers drive in and park.
Staff and customers either come in by public transport or are dropped off early in the morning and collected in the evening. Some of this was a hang-over from the tout days, a lot is now the result of the very high parking charges. So those high charges are killing the cows that the council wants to milk.
In addition, residents do not know how much parking money and fines are collected and what they are spent on. There are rumours of a group of very highly paid managerial staff pushing up the administrative charges, as well as money diverted to unknown causes, with Rufaro Stadium being one of the few known beneficiaries.
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Annual reports, with the revenue, the percentage of revenue spent on administration, the profits and how those are allocated now seem to be essential. At the same time the council needs to think seriously how it wants the city centre to develop. There is nothing wrong with public transport being primary, taking over from car traffic, but this would require a major revamp of administration, revenue and spending, probably grouping the terminuses, parkades, traffic lights and street parking into a single entity so we can have high-class transport services for the capital city of an upper middle-income country.
Instead we have falling numbers of parked cars, but no upgrade of council terminuses or traffic infrastructure, with street lights and traffic lights ever diminishing.
The council policy needs to change, and start looking at what the businesses in the city centre need to attract customers from outside, instead of taking in each others' washing or relying on people using the city centre as a bus trip changeover point.
Parking revenue appears to be a diminishing source of revenue, and regular increases in charges will not make up for this. It needs to be used properly, while still reasonably high, to build and maintain the modern infrastructure a decent city centre requires.
