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Innocent Ruwende Senior Reporter
The Zimbabwe National Road Administration has allocated Harare City Council $12 million for the rehabilitation of the city’s roads and the city will inject a further $12 million after the roads were declared a state of disaster recently.
The allocation is, however, a far cry from the $500 million council says it requires to fix the city’s roads. In an interview yesterday, Works director Engineer Zvenyika Chawatama said the city was embarking on the CBD Roads Asphalt Overlay Programme and also attending to uncompleted roads, which were affected by a shortage of bitumen.
The rehabilitation of the CBD roads is part of the local authority’s 100-day targets to be implement as per Government directive.
“We are attending to roads, which remained uncompleted as a result of bitumen shortage and the Christmas break and were eventually damaged. These roads include, but are not limited to Aspindale Road, Green Trees Road (Aspindale), Waterfalls Avenue, Crowborough Road in Warren Park D, Beeston Road (Chisipite) and Knights Bridge Road,” he said.
“These roads were done to the last base level some of them were primed as we approached the festive season. Basically I will say the major challenge then became the unavailability of bitumen to finish the processes.”
Eng Chawatama said lack of bitumen is linked to foreign currency shortage to import the product as it has to compete with other requirements such as water treatment chemicals. He said this year the city has started receiving some bitumen and is attending to the roads.
Online Reporter