By 
By Ross Moyo
Harare Mayor Jacob Mafume has attributed the failure to achieve the Smart City 2025 vision to decisions made by previous administrations, despite having been in office during the project’s implementation period.
Rather than accepting responsibility as the current leader of the city, Mayor Mafume argued that the shortcomings stemmed from a flawed foundation laid by his predecessors. According to the Mayor, previous councils prioritized the procurement of hardware ahead of the essential digital systems required to support a smart city framework.
“Legacy councils bought hardware before software. CCTV and Wi-Fi infrastructure without robust data systems, open-budget platforms, and API-first governance models cannot scale,” he said.
Mafume contended that the Smart City 2025 initiative ultimately failed because the underlying digital operating system needed to integrate and manage these technologies was never established.
The new target is 2030, and the architecture changes. Mafume wants open data portals, transparent municipal spend, and APIs that let devs build civic apps. Council becomes a platform, not a walled garden.
IoT is the sensor layer for 2030. Water leak detectors, smart meters, traffic counters, air quality nodes. These push real-time data to dashboards instead of monthly PDFs. In a city losing 60% of treated water, sensors = revenue recovery.
Mafume may as well borrow advice from his one time boss at the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) his former President, Advocate Nelson Chamisa who got him into office by getting him elected on his brand.
Chamisa in a recent exclusive interview with TechnoMag mentioned the only way for Governance fix is,
“Institutions must be bigger than any individual”. Smart cities fail when projects are tied to politicians. Version control and documented APIs ensure continuity when leadership changes.
Accountability shifts from audit reports to live dashboards. If citizens can query ward-level spend via USSD or low-bandwidth web, corruption friction increases. Open data also seeds civic tech: students can build pothole-reporting or billing-dispute apps.
Harare’s constraints are bandwidth + power. 1GB costs ∼$1 and load-shedding is frequent. So the 2030 stack must be offline-first, cache-heavy, with SMS/USSD fallbacks. “Smart” must work without fiber.
Partnerships replace in-house builds. Telcos provide LPWAN, universities run R&D, startups handle UX. Council’s role is data steward + regulator. That’s the model Kigali used to scale e-services.
Security is non-negotiable. Open data ≠ open personal data. Citizen IDs, water usage, billing need encryption, access logs, and data minimization. Trust is infrastructure.
With Funding logic flips, DFIs now fund “digital public infrastructure”, not vanity apps. If Harare proves open data + measurable outcomes, it unlocks concessional finance. No metrics = Smart Billboard 2030.
According to Mafume the bottom line is 2025 failed because hardware preceded governance. 2030 works only if data is public infrastructure, councils act as APIs, and citizens are users with rights. The City Father stated Smart = measurable, not marketed.
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