Gwanda residents have raised their voice against the council following deadly fires which ravaged and destroyed the Power Sales Shop in the Central Business District. They are calling on Local Government Minister Ignatius to act before it is too late by absolving the council of the fire service responsibility.
FULL TEXT of the statement by the Gwanda Residents Association:.
Since the event of the fire that burnt down the Power Sales shop in the Central Business District in Gwanda on Wednesday, 24 June 2015 , we have been inundated with calls from various media houses and members of the public seeking to understand the position of the Residents Association on the matter.
As stated to other sectors already, as Gwanda Residents Association and indeed residents of Gwanda, we are all still disturbed and shocked by the extent to which the Power Sales shop was burnt down while our Municipal Fire Services team failed to deal with the fire.
While we share a lot of sympathy with the Management and Directors of Power Sales on the sad and huge loss, as Residents representatives we are not only worried about the extent of the damage experienced by Power Sales nor about the circumstances around how the fire started, we are also and more so worried about our Municipality’s preparedness and capabilities in dealing with emergencies of this nature.
What worries us more is that our council does not possess a good history of successfully dealing with fires of any magnitude which they have been called to attend to.
In recent years, property running into hundreds of thousands of dollars has been destroyed by fire in and around the town on several separate occasions and in all of them council has rushed to the scenes and failed to deal with the fires.
In the worst incident to date, a couple of years back about ten lives were gruesomely lost when a truck and a smaller vehicle had a head on collusion a few kilometres out of town and, as always, all our Emergency Services could do was to hopelessly stand by and watch while people and the vehicles burnt to ashes.
It is with these continuous disasters and failures by our council in mind that as residents of Gwanda then find ourselves living in fear with no guarantee that our lives and properties are safe in the hands of our council’s emergency services department.
We are wondering how many more lives and how much more property should be destroyed before we can all say “enough is enough” and bring this to an end.
Of major disappointment is that all these losses happen as our council continues declaring that it has acquired state of the art fire fighting equipment and that the staff has been provided with the best training available.
Residents have been shocked time and again to see our fire fighting teams arrive to the scene of a fire failing to operate the fire fighting equipment and/or showing a complete lack of skill and knowledge on how to fight the fire.
After the recent fire at Power Sales, as Residents representatives in the company of some key stakeholders from the town, we invited council to a round table to discuss our preparedness to these disasters with a hope that a collective strategy would be formulated therefrom but council was not prepared to have the dialogue and dismissed the invitation as being unwarranted.
Following this refusal for dialogue by our council, we have no alternative but to appeal to the Ministry of Local Government to immediately suspend Council from offering this service and set up a commission of enquiry into the operations and capabilities of our town’s emergency services department as we can no longer stand the risk of having more properties and lives destroyed by fire in Gwanda.
We expect the commission of enquiry to be able to give a full report on whether our council is indeed prepared and capable to handle these emergencies and if not come up with what really needs to be done to build this department to it’s expected standards.
While that is on going, our local Civil Protection Unit will need to take the matter as a crisis and engage the services of the Zimbabwe Republic Police to set up a fully fledged emergency services section within the police in the town. This section within the police will be expected to attend to these emergencies far much better than what has been the case with our Local Authority until such a time that the Council department is satisfactorily set up and functional.
Bekezela Maduma Fuzwayo Information and Publicity Secretary Gwanda Residents Association.