daniel chigunwe
Tapiwanashe Mangwiro
Contractors working on the Harare-Chirundu Highway have been directed by Treasury to shift their effort and concentrate all their resources to meet the Sadc summit deadlines for inner Harare streets.
Zimbabwe will host the 44th SADC Summit of Heads of State and Government and assume the Chairmanship of SADC on August 17, 2024. The Summit will be hosted at the New Parliament Building in the New City at Mt Hampden.
A week prior to the Summit, the country will host the SADC Industrialisation Week, which means everything should be tidy and done by the time the industrialisation week begins.
In order to meet the deadlines, Vice President, General (Rtd) Dr Constantine Chiwenga was appointed as the Chairperson of an Inter-Ministerial Task Force on SADC Summit Preparations. This move by Treasury has now cast doubt over the timelines of completion of the US$550 million Harare – Chirundu Highway project.
Transport and Infrastructure Development Minister Felix Mhona in January 2024 said the project was earmarked for completion within 18 months at a budget of over half a billion US dollars making it ripe in 2025.
“Those who remember, for the Harare-Chirundu Road, we were talking of over US$550 million for the rehabilitation. This is what we are working with. As we progress, we will continue updating and briefing the electorate.
“He told journalists that not only the Harare-Chirundu Highway was undergoing revamping, but all roads countrywide needed attention,” he said.
The Beitbridge-Masvingo-Harare-Chirundu Highway is expected to be complete by 2025.
The Beitbridge-Masvingo-Harare Highway is 99 percent complete where five local construction companies got contracts to work the busiest highway in the country known as R1.
Companies that got the green light to continue with the Beitbridge-Masvingo-Harare-Chirundu Highway project from Harare to Chirundu are Masimba Construction (Pvt) Ltd, Tensor System, Exodus, Fossil and Bitumen. Fossil Contracting is doing the Harare to Mapinga stretch, Tensor lifts it from there to Chinhoyi, with Exodus doing it from Chinhoyi to Karoi.
Masimba Contracting is doing the Karoi to Makuti stretch with Bitumen world doing the Makuti to Chirundu Highway. The highway is currently characterised by heavy potholes and tiny strips of tar that have largely suffered from heavy trucks going and coming from Zambia and beyond.
Bitumen World has already set up an Asphalt plant that produces 140 tonnes of the product in Makuti.
However, according to Business Weekly investigations, three of the five contractors have withdrawn their equipment after just doing preliminary works.
However, Fossil, which is doing the first stretch that passes through the Mt Hampden area that houses the new parliament, has continued with its works.
Bitumen World is the other contractor still on the ground and working on their part of the highway.
Speaking to Business Weekly, two of the three contractors confirmed that they were told to move their attention to the inner Harare projects which are part of the SADC Summit infrastructure.
“Yes, we have had communication from the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion in conjunction with the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development, telling us that they are prioritising the SADC Summit infrastructure till the end of July,” said an engineer with one of the contractors.
“Payments for the SADC Summit infrastructure are being paid timeously and with no hiccups, but it is the Harare-Chirundu Highway payments that have not come, and the principals said those who can continue working can but will be paid at the end of the third quarter.”
The Harare-Chirundu is a Trans-African highway, linking Zimbabwe to South Africa, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. It is part of the North-South Corridor Project and forms the entire Zimbabwean section of the Cape to Cairo Highway.
The North-South Multimodal Transport Corridor is under the African Union’s Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA).
The PIDA is an all-Africa program to develop a vision, policies and strategies for development of priority transregional and continental infrastructure, which includes transport; hence the rehabilitation of regional road corridors.
Bongani Ndlovu