By Daniel Chigunwe
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| Residents protesting at council office |
Scores of protesters holding placards danced and sang at the Mvurwi Town Council and threatened not to disperse unless their petition was answered by the management which was reportedly said to have taken leave holidays forcing council chairperson Charles Hodobo to convene a firefighting meeting with leaders of the protest.
Speaking during interview the protestors’ spokesperson Gift Chikuse said their issues were specifically directed to the Housing and Welfare Officer, Mrs Letwin Watambwa.
“Our main issue is with Mai Watambwa and we accuse her of trying to hijack our own self developed Kurai Housing Scheme which we serviced alone, we also realized later that council had allocated unscrupulously about 100 stands to beneficiaries of Chris Kuruneri.
“When Kuruneri got into office in 2002 he bought his Zanu Pf supporters about 100 stands as a token of appreciation for voting him, unfortunately when Kuruneri was fired from Zanu PF the council management somehow misused the money he had paid for which we understand was a cheque of about $ 2 million.
“Thereafter, when we started our scheme in 2011, Kuruneri beficiaries started pushing council demanding for their stands, instead council forced these people on our scheme but we demanded that they give us the money we used to develop these stands as we were a self -developing scheme,” said Chikuse.
Kuruneri stands beneficiary Mrs Irene Kantunda said the former MP bought the serviced stands in full though the council took it about more than 10 years to allocate them these stands, “the stands were bought after we were arrested for defending Kuruneri against opposition party in 2002, it was a form of a token of appreciation for the role we had played for his win as MP and since then the council dilly dallied to allocate us the stands.
“Eventually they settled us at Kurai Housing Scheme which was a self-developing scheme without remitting the service fee to the scheme members hence we want the council to clear the air on this issue,”
In an address to the protestors delegation Hodobo said council was going to revisit the Kuruneri issue before giving feedback.
“We need to revisit this issue of Kuruneri, it is unfortunate that you met us for the first time as a committee, we need to look at how the stands were bought, how they have been applied by Kuruneri and why they were missed in the first register. If we come up with a tangible and good position to the Kuruneri issue we have got a date which we have promised to give feedback which is 24 January 2019,” he said
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