THE silly season is slowly approaching with less than 20 months left before the next elections. We now have President Emmerson Mnangagwa promising voters manna from heaven, declaring that what happened in Zambia will never happen in Zimbabwe, while other politicians promise to provide the best of roads, education, healthcare and even make sure everyone is in a middle class by 2030.
The issue is that some of the people who are making these promises have been in power since 1980, and it has suddenly dawned upon them that they are the panacea to our problems overnight. If they have failed to provide any meaningful development for the past 41 years, what will they do differently in the next five years?
We know how senior government officials are quickly airlifted to South Africa or China when they get sick, how they send their children to the best universities abroad, how their wives go for shopping in Dubai, yet they tell us that the best is still to come if we entrust them with five more years to further impoverish us.
I have long stopped buying the notion that politicians are there to serve the people, they are just there to protect their interests and fatten their wallets. They only think of covering poor people in the dust left by their 4×4 vehicles once in every five years.
Look at how they take people for granted by giving them useless things like T-shirts, scarves, caps, food parcels and beer during the campaign period, only to disappear once they are in power.
My message to fellow Zimbabweans is that come 2023, show the fat cats who the real boss is.- Batsi Gonzo
Consider local firms for road project
WHILE we are preoccupied with the noise from the political parties as 2023 nears, the Chinese are quietly tightening their grip on Zimbabwe by grabbing mining claims and every mountain to extract black granite.
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I don’t hold anything against Chinese companies, but this is one project that should have been awarded to a local company, which in turn could have subcontracted foreign firms given the scale of funding and earthworks involved.
Way back in the 1980s, I remember a local company Gulliver Construction, did a good job of dualising the Chitungwiza-Harare Highway and the road is still in perfect condition.
If the company is still operational, it should have been awarded the Beitbridge-Harare-Chirundu Road project and jobs could have been created, while our money would have remained in the country.- Taona Chauya
Mushikashika drivers law unto themselves
THE chaos that is obtaining on our national roads as a result of errant commuter omnibus drivers needs to be addressed before a disaster of mega proportions strikes.
Since the police scaled down their presence and effectiveness on the roads, public service vehicle drivers have virtually become law unto themselves and are now a menace to other road users.
I wonder how long the police will continue to fold their hands and look the other way while pretending as if nothing is happening in the traffic jungle playing out on the streets of Harare.
Day-in, day-out road users are being subjected to torture and abuse by commuter omnibus drivers competing to shred every section of the Road Traffic Act. What has happened to the good old policing methods where the mere presence of a police officer on the road was deterrent enough to whip rogue motorists into line?
Are the police waiting for a major disaster to happen on the streets of Harare for them to tame the errant kombi drivers?
If I were the President of this country, I would order all kombis and the so-called pirate taxis (mushikashikas) off Harare’s roads until sanity prevails. The local authority and central government have completely lost the plot in as far as managing public transport is concerned. Maybe everyone is too preoccupied with serious issues affecting our day-to-day lives.
The police have abdicated their duty and have failed road users as they have also become accomplices to the chaos reigning supreme on our roads.-Rooney Taronga
