MDC-T president Douglas Mwonzora says the party’s Harare councillors are not to blame for approving the controversial US$344 million Pomona waste-to-energy deal.
Addressing a news conference in Harare on Thursday, Mwonzora said his councillors were duped into rubberstamping the deal by the technical people at Harare City Council.
The deal, which ties down the cash-strapped city into a 30-year financial burden to Netherlands-based Geogenix BV, has been rejected by the rival CCC councillors.
The Government imposed the deal on the City of Harare with no resistance from MDC-T councillors before the election of CCC councillors in the 26 March by-elections.
Mwonzora said the deal should be renegotiated, arguing that his councillors were intellectually under-equipped to comprehend the complexities of the terms of the deal. He said:
The council during due diligence was represented by the acting town clerk who himself is an engineer.
He came with a report to council and the recommendation was that this deal is worth to be taken and at that point in time the councillors had no cause to disbelieve him.
Not only that, the councillors were told that the Attorney General, the chief legal advisor of the country, had looked at this deal and said it was okay; so they had no cause to disbelieve it.
But it did not have all the nitty gritties that are there, the financial statement, financial model and so on were not out before the councillors.
At any rate, we would not rely on the councillors’ interpretation of that because they are not technically equipped to do that, the technically equipped people did that and made recommendations.
Mwonzora said he supported the renegotiation of the deal as opposed to its complete abandonment that would see the council paying Geogenix BV US$3.5 million in damages.
According to some of the terms of the deal, Harare is obliged to pay Geogenix BV US$40 per tonne of waste delivered at the Pomona dumpsite.
The minimum daily delivery is 550 tonnes, or 200 750 tonnes per year, which equates to US$8.03 million for Geogenix BV in the first year.