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Nqobile Tshili, Chronicle Reporter
COUNCILLORS from urban local authorities yesterday slammed the Zimbabwe National Roads Authority (Zinara) for alleged corruption and failure to disburse road maintenance funds on time among other issues.
This emerged during the ongoing Urban Councils’ Association of Zimbabwe (UCAZ) 78th annual conference in Bulawayo where Zinara’s deputy director Engineer Wishes Wauwa made a presentation highlighting mostly the parastatal’s operational challenges. Councillors blasted the parastatal and said it must take its duties seriously.
Eng Wauwa sparked the storm after revealing that Zinara was struggling in its operations and would only disburse $300 million for road maintenance to local authorities from its projected $800 million revenue inflows in 2020. “As Zinara we are facing a lot of difficulties in funding the maintenance of your roads because of the revenues that we are realising. If you look at tollgates, motorists are paying ZW$10 as opposed to previous situations where we were collecting US$2 per vehicle. If you look at the statistics when we were collecting US$2, we were able to collect something in the region of US$200 million per year. But now at the current rates and basing on our budget for next year, we will only be able to collect about ZW$800 million of which if we remove the expenses, we would only be able to disburse around ZW$300 million. That is not enough to fund road maintenance,” said Eng Wauwa.
He said councils have to bear with the road authority as it does not have money.
However, councillors could not stomach his presentation and accused the road authority of not taking its mandate seriously. “I think Zinara should take its duties seriously. How does it budget more money for other expenses as opposed to its core duties of disbursing funds to councils,” quizzed one of the councillors.
Another councillor said: “Zinara has a very bad public image. It is known for corruption. How can you assure us that public funds are safe under your authority?”
Another councillor said while Zinara last year claimed to have allocated some money to local authorities, it has not disbursed the funds. He said as a result, some local authorities contracted some companies who fulfilled their obligations but to date councils are yet to pay those firms due to Zinara’s ineptitude. The councillor said some firms were even suing local authorities for failing to pay for services rendered. In response, Eng Wauwa defended Zinara saying it was not neglecting on its duties.
He said some funds it collected would be used to repay loans that the parastatal acquired in financing the construction of the Plumtree to Mutare Highway. “Someone said how safe is the money we are getting from tollgates? I think this comes from a recent report from the papers (media) that was saying there was some looting of funds. That statement is correct in some sense in that at tollgates there are people who are manipulating the system trying to get some money from the tollgates. But our systems can easily pick when fraud is being done. And our partners who developed the system are giving us those reports and we give them to the police and the law takes its course. So funds coming from tollgates are very safe,” said Eng Wauwa. — @nqotshili
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