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*Mafume Hunts Missing US$200m as Services Crumble*
HARARE Mayor Jacob Mafume says the city will pursue an estimated US$200 million flagged by the auditor-general, as public anger deepens over collapsing services, failing infrastructure and what residents increasingly view as a crisis of accountability at Town House.

His pledge comes as Harare’s decline is visible across the capital, dry taps, sewage spilling into residential streets, uncollected refuse and pothole-scarred roads disrupting traffic and commerce.

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Central to Mafume’s reform push is the restoration of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the digital backbone used to track municipal revenue, procurement, payroll, contracts and expenditure.

For years, the city operated without a functioning ERP platform, a lapse critics say created fertile ground for revenue leakages, manipulation and corruption.

ERP systems are standard in modern municipalities because they reduce human interference, strengthen accountability and ensure transactions are traceable. Without an integrated system, Harare struggled to reconcile revenue, monitor spending and manage procurement.

In an interview this week, Mafume acknowledged the scale of the financial governance crisis exposed by the auditor-general.

“We are going to chase the missing US$200 million that was indicated by the auditor-general. We are also going to make sure that our accounts and processes are now electronic,” Mafume said.

He conceded the city had operated for a prolonged period without the basic digital infrastructure widely used globally to manage public finances.

“We did not have an ERP for quite some time and we have now restored the ERP,” Mafume said.

He added that the city would “increasingly remove the human face within our operations and make sure that our operations can operate in the digital world”.

Financial experts say reliance on manual systems and fragmented databases weakens oversight and

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