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Leonard Ncube Victoria Falls Reporter
VICTORIA Falls Municipality, which faces shortage of land for expansion, plans to avail close to 1,000 housing stands. The stands will be between Mkhosana and Chinotimba suburbs along the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls main road and along Kazungula-Victoria Falls road. The place had over the years been reserved as an animal corridor with no development allowed. The local authority has a housing backlog of about 10,000.

Town Clerk Christopher Dube recently told a full council meeting that high demand for housing had forced the council to seek clearance to develop the buffer zone for housing development.

“The buffer zone is the area between the main road and Mkhosana stands, which is not supposed to be developed. It’s 300m in width and now we would have to reduce it to only 70m and develop stands on the other end,” said Dube.

He said the development had been pushed by high demand for housing in the resort town. The Town Clerk said for nearly five years the local authority had tried to get authorisation to change the land use which was only granted recently.

“We’re going to allocate 900 stands. We’ve been authorised by the Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Ministry. Initially people objected because they didn’t see reason in our plans and as such the minister couldn’t sign,” Dube said.

He said as a way of preserving the environment, the local authority will erect a fence securing the remaining 70 metres from the main road to the residential area to prevent random movement into the bush.

The idea will be to preserve vegetation so that houses are not visible from the road.

Preliminary work, which involves pegging, has already been done on the land.

On Saturday the local authority released a notice indicating that it had engaged a consultant, Wintron Development Consultancy from Bulawayo to carry out an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) before servicing of the stands could start.

In the statement the council stated that it intends to “extend its high and medium density suburbs by 919 stands on either side of the Victoria Falls-Bulawayo main road and on the southern side of Kazungula-Victoria Falls road”.

The buffer zone is the same area that has been invaded by open space churches that have sprouted in the resort town with the local authority now seeking to ban them for defiling the environment.