adminDumisani Nsingo, Senior Business Reporter
FOUR local authorities have not submitted their income and expenditure statements detailing the use of funds allocated to them by the Zimbabwe National Road Authority (Zinara) last year to carry out road rehabilitation projects.
Zinara acting chief executive officer Engineer Moses Juma said the four local authorities that were still to submit their income and expenditure statements were Makonde, Zaka, Guruve and Mutasa rural district councils (RDCs).
“Out of 60 RDCs, 56 have acquitted and it’s only four that have not acquitted. All urban councils have acquitted so as you can see there has been an improvement on acquittals. When one acquits properly it means they have used the money efficiently.
“We have gone to the ground and collaborated the output efficiently and when my team is satisfied we give them (local authorities) the next tranche so in terms of output we are satisfied with the authorities. To those few that have not yet acquitted, we are saying acquit now so that we can then disburse because if you don’t acquit, you don’t get funding from Zinara,” said Eng Juma.
He, however, said there has been commendable improvement in the usage of funds allocated by the road administrator to local authorities to maintain road networks especially in 2015 and since the beginning of the year.
“Most of the RDCs are grading their roads. There are a lot of culverts, drainage structures and bridges that were damaged during Cyclone Eline and most of the local authorities have started programmes where they are now using members of the community to gather stones and then they (councils) buy the cement and then they start building crossing points . . . so there has been a major improvement in the utilisation of Zinara resources,” said Eng Juma.
Zinara has disbursed $23,7 million out of the allocation of $48 million this year.
Zinara started disbursing funds for road rehabilitation programmes to local authorities in 2002 through revenue generated from collection of road-user charges, fuel levy, vehicle licences, vehicle transit fees, toll-gate fees, road tolls and abnormal load charges.
Its revenue generation has been on an upward trend since the dollarisation of the country’s economy with $32 million being raised in 2009 while it collected $155,7 million last year.
Mr Juma said some of the local authorities that were still to submit their income and expenditure statements for last year were still sitting on last year’s batches owing to lack of requisite human resources.
“Some of the local authorities don’t have engineers and technicians so their technical capacity is limited, that’s one of the challenges we have observed. So we are trying to see how we can twin them with other local authorities that are doing well so that at least we can disburse the funds to them then work will be done on the ground,” said Eng Juma.
The road administrator is targeting to disburse $48 million this year and to date it has since allocated $22 million to various local authorities.
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