Muchadeyi Masunda was made Mayor of Harare in when under the agreement reached between President Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, the recently elected councillors were free to vote for an independent considered suitable for the role.
What do you think have been your biggest achievements in office? One is the water situation. When we got into office, the water infrastructure was completely broken. Now we are producing around mega litres. We are very lucky to have the kind of water engineers that we have. The second thing is that we have done a lot to improve the service delivery in the health institutions and we are bearing the brunt of everything to do with health in the city.
In our maternity centres, the busiest one has babies delivered a month and we have made strides there. On the international side, we have resuscitated the twinning arrangements with Munich in Germany, Cincinatti in the US and Nottingham in the UK and have entered into new ones with Kazan and Guangzhou.
I am very pleased with the support we have had from Munich: they have been paying for two ICT consultants to help us with our billing system. So we have two consultants one of whom is a Zimbabwean who has been living in Hamburg for the last 25 years. You spent 12 years as a lawyer and three as chief executive of a newspaper group.
What drove you to make the move to mayor? One factor is my background: my parents were community leaders in Bulawayo. My father was regarded by many, cynically and in jest, as the unofficial Mayor of Bulawayo way back in the s before independence because of the amount of influence he had.
