TRANSPORT minister Joram Gumbo has said all Zimbabwe’s roads are in a bad state and like “death traps”, but government was broke to rehabilitate them.
BY MTHANDAZO NYONI
“All our roads are in a bad state and there is no doubt about that. Whether you talk of rural or State roads they are all very bad,” Gumbo told NewsDay last week on the sidelines of a tour to assess the condition of roads in Matabeleland region.
“This is the reason why I am here just to have my own evaluation of the state of the roads particularly that we are coming to the rainy season and end of year when we look at the Christmas period and so forth. I want to see that something is done on the roads. If you look at the main roads like the Beitbridge, Masvingo, Chirundu-Harare roads, it’s all potholes, it’s like a death trap.”
He said all the roads whether it was in Mashonaland, Midlands or Matabeleland, were all “a recipe for disaster”.
“Those roads have not been rehabilitated for a long, long time. Regravelling is not good enough, so we need to redo the roads because some of them have not been attended to since the Cyclone Eline rain, which is about 10 to 15 years ago.”
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“So it goes without questions that you cannot even talk of tarred or gravel roads as in a state that you can say they are passable. All our roads are bad and there is no money at this particular time to redo the roads and this is why I am encouraging road authorities to use the little that they have got from Zinara to improve some of the roads,” he added.
Gumbo said as a ministry, they were also trying to come up with partnerships to dualise major roads like Bulawayo-Beitbridge and Bulawayo-Victoria Falls highways.
He added the government was going to dualise the Beitbridge-Masvingo road, Harare-Chirundu as well as Harare-Nyamapanda road but the money was a stumbling block.