The Sunday Mail
Maxwell Christian Chikirivao
During this US$ era, leases, coupled with commercial rates being charged to churches, have become major cost drivers that have seen their debts ballooning.
In the ZW$ era, there was no liquidity crisis and people used to pay their tithes in cash.
There were no salary arrears to employees and churches would in turn pay their financial obligations to councils. The present normalised abnormality of not paying employees their salaries did not exist back then.
So with unpaid salaries to some Christian employees in the present dispensation, such a scenario inevitably means reduced or no tithes go to churches. The affected churches in turn are unable to meet their financial obligations, hence the ballooning of debts.
Anti-tithes heretical doctrine
In the present scenario that arose four to five years into dollarisation, an anti-tithing doctrine has arisen to the detriment of churches, thus reducing their tithing income. Most Pentecostal churches too have lost their members to Prophetic churches that have mushroomed since the dollarisation of the economy.
Company closures and job terminations have also negatively affected Christians and non-Christians alike, thus contributing to reduced tithing income. Churches should keep on teaching that tithing is a biblical doctrine. They should gear their teachings to counter the present day heretical doctrines.
A council official at Rowan Martin Building said another contributing factor is that since dollarisation, the emerging young generation of councillors do not appreciate the critical role played by churches in making Zimbabwe a better place.
He said they have been charging commercial rates to churches. Churches are non-profit making organisations.
Churches, through their mother bodies like Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC), Catholic Bishops Conference (CBC) and Union For The Development of Apostolic and Zion Churches (UDACIZA), should lobby councils for decreased rates in view of their not for profit making status and their ministry of compassion work in the community.
The official I referred to earlier indicated that in taking the decision to charge commercially, council officials had observed the apparent lavish lifestyle by Prophetic churches’ leaders and therefore lumped all churches into one basket.
Yet very few Prophetic churches have lease agreements with council. Take for example Prophetic, Healing and Deliverance Ministries in Harare, United Family International Church in Chitungwiza, etcetera.
Very few Prophetic churches are tenants of Harare City Council.
When he was commenting on why rates for hiring the City Sports Centre had been increased for UFIC, the former Mayor of Harare, Mr Muchadeyi Masunda, said council intended to reap commensurate benefits from its properties that it hires out to churches.
There is a perception that has arisen, rightly or wrongly, that churches are raking in supernormal revenue and must therefore pay increased or commercial rates.
A massive rates reduction would be the key to reducing debt accumulation as there is no sense in charging churches commercial rates when they do not have the capacity to pay them.
In my view, the dubious religious practices that have rocked the church at large in the post-dollarisation era, including prophetic chicanery, might also have led authorities to view the church in negative light, as entities that have turned into money-making enterprises.
Unfortunately, the majority of the Prophetic church leaders that caused these scandals are not members of the four major church bodies in Zimbabwe and are thus unaccountable to them in the self-regulating church mechanism that exists in Zimbabwe.
There is no church registration in Zimbabwe.
Councils need to take this into consideration when increasing rates for long- standing churches that have stood the test of time.
In a few instances, some churches that are owners of the land on which their churches are built, may not have taken advantage of Section 270-272 of the Urban Councils Act to apply for exemption from paying council rates for religious organisations. This might be due to ignorance.
However, even if a religious organisation is an owner of the land on which its’ place of worship is built, owner charges exemption is not automatic. It is only granted on application using council forms and after a rigorous vetting exercise, sometimes after stealth investigations by council officers.
The council employees may actually come and attend the church services as part of their investigations. The other disadvantage is that even after the applications are made, councils seem to bureaucratically take its sweet time to approve the application. In the meantime, rates will be accumulating with interest unabated.
Councils need to speed up the approval process and this should not take more than three months.
Legislative changes may be needed in this regard. Christians in their individual capacities, churches and their mother bodies, need to lobby the Mayor, councillors and MPs for these legislative changes.
Where a church’s application is approved, council usually approves only the area where actual church activities are conducted and excludes other necessary buildings such as church offices, church staff quarters and the pastors or mission house.
Procedural or legislative changes need to be effected in order for churches to be exempted 100 percent. Sometimes if councils observe that a church hires out its church auditorium or grounds for private functions as happens at Celebration Centre, exemption might be hard to come by.
Such activities may take place on rare occasions to boost the church’s revenue in the wake of reduced traditional church income.
Legislative or procedural changes need to be effected to make rates exemption automatic upon a church being allocated a stand.
Council can work hand in hand with mother bodies like EFZ, CBC, ZCC, UDACIZA, etc so that bonafide ecclesiastical members of these institutions enjoy rates exemption.
Or who do not want to be accountable to these voluntary mother bodies.
The present situation already exists whereby a church organisation is exempted from customs duty by ZIMRA, upon presenting a current membership certificate on importation of goods and or services from outside the country.
I seem to have observed that about 20 percent of the amounts owed to councils might be due to billing errors of one kind or another. Interest rates also seem to violate the in-duplum common law rule.
I observed as a certain church that had its water supplies cut off about three years back, yet council periodically still sends more notices of water disconnection. When this notice of water disconnection is sent, the tenant church is automatically charged with a reconnection fee.
How can one be charged a reconnection fee for water supplies that have not been reconnected? It seems these disconnection and reconnection charges are automatically generated by the council’s billing system.
Possible solutions
On a practical level, Christians in their individual capacities, churches and their mother bodies need to lobby the Mayor, councillors and Minister of Local Government for reduced rates for churches.
They need to encourage councils to sell the stands that they are leasing to churches at non-commercial rates.
Councils also need to cancel outstanding church rates that are over three years in terms of the Prescription Act as read together with Section 283 of the Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29-15) on writing-off of irrecoverable rates or rates that are too costly for Council to recover, even if they are five years and less.
It appears to me by a reverse or inverse reading of Section 283 that debts that are above five years need to be automatically cancelled. Again, Christians need to lobby responsible authorities for the cancellation of these debts.
Maxwell Christian Chikirivao is a freelance labour and employment law consultant. He writes in his personal capacity.
