adminLovemore Zigara Midlands Correspondent
THE cash-strapped Gweru City Council, which needs about $27 million for roads rehabilitation, has exhausted $166,000 it received from the Zimbabwe National Roads Administration last year.
Gweru City Council commissioner Tsunga Mhangami said most of the city’s roads had outlived their lifespan and the local authority was financially constrained to continue patching the potholes.
As a result, the city council had resorted to scrapping some of the tarred roads to turn them into gravel networks.
He said as the council battled with pothole patching, the only reasonable and cost effective way to deal with the situation was to turn them into gravel roads.
Of late, the local authority has just been filling potholes with gravel and this was not lasting especially during this rainy season as the gravel has been washed away by runoff.
“A good number of roads in the residential areas no longer need patching simply because they’ve outlived their lifespan. Most of them now need to be scrapped and make them gravel until council has funds to tar them.
“The roads were left unattended for a long time and this is a capital intensive project which requires a lot of money and at the moment council doesn’t have money to undertake a road rehabilitation exercise,” said Mhangami.
He said council has already started scrapping and turning some of the roads in Mkoba high density into gravel and a private contractor had been engaged to provide the gravel.
Mhangami said the local authority last year received $166,000 for roads rehabilitation from the Zimbabwe National Roads Administration (Zinara).
“Funds allocated to the local authority by Zinara have been exhausted and we’re waiting the disbursement of funds for this year.
“We last received funds from Zinara in September last year and that budget has since been exhausted and we’re waiting disbursement of this year’s allocation. At the moment, we’re using council coffers because the situation doesn’t look good at all on the ground,” he said.
Roads rehabilitation has been a cause for concern for local authorities in the country.
Zinara chairman Albert Mugabe is on record as saying massive investment is required to rehabilitate the country’s roads.
Between 2010 and mid last year, Zinara had disbursed about $112 million to local authorities.
Zimbabwe requires $5 billion to rehabilitate its road network.
Online Reporter