Who is going to patch potholes on Harare’s roads?
The Standard Editorial
This seems to be the question on every road user’s mind in the capital these day where potholes are getting deeper and wider by the day, making it difficult for motorists to navigate their way through the bad roads.
The potholes are causing untold damage to vehicle suspensions and tyres.
In worst cases, motorists trying to avoid them have been involved in accidents, leading to loss of lives.
The Harare City Council, which is supposed to fix the roads, is doing nothing about the problem which is getting worse.
There are no council repair teams on the roads, no signs to warn motorists of impending danger caused by trenches and nobody at the local authority seems to care. This dereliction of duty on the part of the council is shocking, to say the least.
Harare City Council should have anticipated that the onset of the rains would worsen the problem of potholes and deploying response teams to attend to the problem should have been a priority.
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Where are the pothole patching machines that were donated by Zinara amid pomp and fanfare a few months ago?
The lack of repairmen on the disintegrating roads means motorists can only pray for divine intervention.
Hard-pressed families now spend precious dollars repairing their vehicles, something they had never budgeted for.
The money, which is difficult to raise in this tight liquidity environment, could have been used for other productive purposes if the roads were well-maintained.
A number of people have also lost their lives in accidents that can be attributed to the state of the roads, and more accidents may be recorded during the festive season if council fails to act.
The local authority should urgently come up with a plan to revamp the road network in order to make it usable for thousands of people who travel in the city every day.
Council must also formulate a strategy to deal with congestion that has been worsened by the influx of ex-Japanese vehicles which have flooded the city. This could provide relief to its long suffering ratepayers.
