Chronicle Editor
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
TELECOMMUNICATION companies that excavate roads to install fibre optic cables and fail to properly backfill the resulting trenches will now face stiff penalties.
In many urban areas, resurfaced roads are being repeatedly dug up, causing significant inconvenience for residents, particularly in neighbourhoods where multiple companies are laying cables.
Zimbabwe is home to over ten telecommunication providers, including ZOL, Africom, Dandemutande, TelOne, Utande, Telecel, NetOne, Econet, Standard Telephones and Cables and Gikko. Many of these companies have shown reluctance to share infrastructure, exacerbating the disruption caused by their operations.
As a result, there are cases where different companies are trenching and laying separate cables in the same area. What is, however, worrying is that some of the poorly backfilled trenches gradually become potholes or puddles.
Speaking at the recently ended Africa Infrastructure and Built Environment Confex (AfriConfex) 2024 Conference on Thursday, Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development Permanent Secretary, Engineer Joy Makumbe expressed concern over the trenches, stating that they should be a thing of the past.
“There are people with silo mentality, at the end of the day you do a road, the next morning you are finding people have dug that road, someone is laying cables.
It is a discussion we are having as a Ministry to say we should come up with a law to say whoever is going to be digging up our new roads they go to jail, because they have no idea how much those roads are costing us,” she said.
She said as Government, they were being innovative to make sure that they fund the setting up, rehabilitation and upgrade of roads, only for them to be dug up.
Eng Makumbe said there were going to be stiff penalties for those that were leaving behind trenches on the roads.
“It’s all because people are not planning together, you want to put in a water pipe, WiFi cables or electricity cables underground, so when you know there is such a project that is happening let’s all sit on the table and discuss, come up with ducts so that you do not end up just digging up infrastructure,” she added.
The Permanent Secretary said another thing that was going to guide infrastructure development were Master Plans being developed by local authorities.
She said these will benchmark how and where infrastructure is developed to avoid haphazard construction.
“Master Plans makes development of our cities predictable, to avoid haphazard construction and they will bring sanity in our cities and towns.
You need data to plan, we need to know what is happening and how many people we have and even the age brackets so that we can plan accordingly,” she said.
Eng Makumbe called for innovation in the entire built environment value chain, stating that it should correlate with sustainability and climate change.
She said innovative infrastructure was the barometer for economic growth. “It means that we need to innovative in line with the direction where the country is moving and where we are going so that at the end of the day we get the infrastructure that we want and is applicable to the solutions that we are seeking.
“We also need public-private partnerships (PPPs) for different models of funding that contractors and service providers can actually present to Government to further develop out infrastructure,” she said.
The Permanent Secretary said innovations in infrastructure development must be locally suited for them to be sustainable.
She also called for effective use of land to ensure other sectors are also catered for.
The three-day event, which ended on Friday is Zimbabwe’s biggest gathering of buyers and sellers for the entire built environment value chain and it ran under the theme: “Resilient Cities, Thriving Africa: Building Sustainable Infrastructure for Economic Growth.”
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter