OUR roads are broken. Our driving is worse. And we keep pretending that more interchanges will fix it.
Rehabilitate the roads. Build interchanges. Dualise the highways. These are the answers Zimbabwe reaches for every time Harare grinds to a standstill, and to be fair, they are not wrong answers. The roads do need fixing. The Mbudzi Interchange was genuinely needed.
The Trabablas interchange at Simon Mazorodze, High Glen, and Chitungwiza Roads was a real improvement. Nobody is against fixing potholes.
The problem is that we treat these things as the solution when they are just maintenance. Road rehabilitation keeps existing roads usable. It does not resolve the fact that those roads are carrying two or three times the volume of traffic they were ever designed to handle. An interchange moves cars more efficiently through a junction. It does not reduce the number of cars. And when the Harare-Norton dualisation took 20 years to complete 40km, finishing at roughly two kilometres per year, the case for road infrastructure as our primary answer to congestion becomes very difficult to make seriously.
The question that needs answering is not how we can move all these cars better. It is why there are so many cars in the first place.
The answer is not that Zimbabweans suddenly fell in love with driving. It was the system intended to move people around, but it was never built properly, and what little existed was allowed to fall apart
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Harare's intracity transport has never truly been run by the State. It has always depended on the private kombi sector: privately owned minibuses that grew rapidly in the 1990s to fill a gap that formal public transport could not cover. For a long time, chaotic as they were, kombis worked. They were everywhere, they were affordable, and they got people home.
Then COVID-19 arrived. The government used the lockdowns to clear unfranchised kombis off the roads, pushing commuters toward Zupco. But Zupco’s actual business is intercity travel, running routes between cities and towns across the country.
It was never set up to run the dense, frequent, intracity services that a capital city needs. Forcing it into that role without the fleet, the routes, or the planning to do it was always going to fail. And it did. Harare was left with a public transport gap; it had no real plan to fill.
What grew back into that gap was the mushika-shika: ordinary private cars operating as unlicensed taxis, flagged down on street corners, priced by negotiation, technically illegal, and for many commuters the only realistic way to get across the city. This is not a fringe activity. It is how a very large number of Harare's residents get around every day
And alongside all of this, people bought cars. Not because it was glamorous. Because it was the only way to guarantee getting to work on time. By the end of 2022, Zimbabwe had nearly 1,5 million registered vehicles, a number that had grown by almost 7% in a single year.
By mid-2023, that figure had risen to over 1.58 million, with more than three-quarters of those being light motor vehicles: small cars, minivans, repurposed vans carrying far more passengers than their seats were designed for.
Every one of them is on roads that were designed in the 1960s and 1970s for a city half this size. No interchange fixes that.
This is what a governance failure looks like at street level. It looks like traffic.
But here is the part of this conversation we tend to skip over, because it is less comfortable than blaming the government
Our driving is a serious problem too.
In 2022, Zimbabwe recorded 51,107 road traffic accidents. Two thousand and sixty-four people died. More than 10 000 were injured. Between January and September 2023 alone, there were 38 482 crashes. That is one accident every 10 minutes, around the clock, every day. The Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe has found that 92% of all accidents where a cause could be established came down to human error.
Not potholes. Not bad road design. Us.
Speeding. Dangerous overtaking. Driving while drunk. Driving a car that should have been taken off the road years ago. These are choices, and they are killing people at a rate that should disturb us far more than it does.
And then there is this: in the last quarter of 2023, Zimbabwe tested 70 461 people for their certificate of competency as drivers. Only 39,4% passed.
In some provinces, the pass rate was below 40%.
That means the majority of people who sat that test were found not ready to drive. Many of them are on the road anyway.
We have roads full of cars that should not be there, driven by people who were never properly prepared to drive them, on roads not built to handle either. This is not bad luck.
It is the result of two failures running side by side: a state that never built the urban transport system it owed its citizens, and a culture that has never taken road safety seriously enough.
Both need fixing at the same time.
A single full bus takes roughly sixty cars off the road. A working train line between Chitungwiza and Harare could shift thousands of people every hour without adding a single vehicle to the traffic.
Cities that have genuinely solved congestion did not do it by building more interchanges. They made public transport good enough that people chose it, even people who owned cars. That is the standard we need to be honest about not meeting.
What needs to happen is not complicated to describe, even if it is hard to do. The kombi sector is the real backbone of intracity movement in Harare and always has been.
It needs a proper legal framework: licensed, regulated, with set routes and fare structures, instead of the permanent uncertainty operators live under until someone decides to crack down.
Mushika-shika needs either a path into a formal taxi system or genuine, consistent enforcement, not the selective operations that satisfy nobody.
The Chitungwiza rail line needs a spade in the ground, not another study. And driver licensing needs to mean something: if you fail the test, you do not drive.
There is a cultural shift needed too. In Zimbabwe, owning a car has become a sign of having made it.
Taking the kombi is seen, by many, as a sign of the opposite. This is an attitude we cannot afford.
It means that people in positions to fix things never use the system they are meant to be improving.
It means public transport stays underfunded and undervalued. And it means the intervention most likely to ease congestion is also the hardest to champion.
The road to fixing this is not made of tarmac. It is made of political decisions, honest regulation, and a willingness to say plainly that what we have built is not working.
Get everyone on a kombi that runs a proper route. Get everyone on a train that actually exists. And hold the people behind the wheel to a standard that keeps the rest of us alive.
Only then will the roads carry what they were built to carry. Only then will the daily commute become something manageable rather than something you survive.
Only then will we stop treating a governance problem like an engineering problem and start doing the honest work of fixing it.