Council ERP Scrapped and Reinstated (BIQ)
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
Harare scrapped its South African BIQ enterprise-resource-planning system in May 2019 — at 92% implementation, after its audit committee found it 'could not generate a reliable trial balance' — then ran the capital's billing largely manually for five years; by 2024 the mayor conceded the city did not know how many households it was billing. After the procurement regulator blocked a US$57M foreign ERP and a US$2.8M billing system, the council re-engaged the original vendor in April 2024 for US$2.6M on the Auditor-General's recommendation. The reinstated BIQ is rolling out in phases, and the 2026 budget calls full deployment a 'non-negotiable commitment' — separate from the billing layer bundled into the city's prepaid-water PPP.
📊 Impact
Council officials told the Cheda Commission of Inquiry the city was losing about US$70M a year in uncollected revenue without a working ERP — roughly US$350M over five years — with collections at 40-50% of a US$500M+ budget (council testimony).
🎓 Lesson
Switching a billing data layer off is also a decision: Harare dropped BIQ at 92% implementation, ran on manual processes for five years while the procurement regulator blocked two replacements, and ended up re-hiring the original vendor.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Council ERP Scrapped and Reinstated (BIQ)” — Harare, Zimbabwe. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/harare-biq-erp-reinstatement/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.