Command Zupco has failed

GOVERNMENT’S monopolistic policy in the transport industry has dismally failed.

When is the government going to admit that it has failed the nation? The Zupco monopoly has failed and it is so nauseating that top government officials parading the same buses which it imported two years ago to hoodwink Zimbabweans that it is doing something. Such cheap propaganda is doing more harm than good to the regime.

The government has completely lost the plot and must lift its ban on private players in the public transport sector.

South Africa, with a population of more than 50 million people did not ban private transport operators, but supported their continued operations.

Imagining that we are now in winter, the pain, frustration and endurance of queuing for transport for more than fours hours is unbearable. Commuters have suffered enough.

The Zanu PF government thinks taking everything into their hands will work. You cannot nationalise everything and at the same time ignoring the private sector.

Policy deficiency and inconsistency is the order of the day in the new dispensation. They would rather spent much of their time trying to decimate the opposition, giving trinkets to voters and threatening to grab Hopewell Chin’ono’s goats instead of crafting policies that improve the lives of Zimbabweans.

When Citizens Coalition for Change leader Nelson Chamisa talked about bullet trains they laughed at his vision, but he was only daring Zimbabweans to believe.

Zimbabwe has no reliable transport system to talk about. Its railway system is dead. The National Railways of Zimbabwe is still using locomotives that were launched in the 1960s.

If the President Emmerson Mnangagwa-led government cannot fix a simple problem like allowing a viable and sound transport sector to function, how is it going to fix an ailing economy?

Propaganda will not fix the problem. Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru and other cities used to have sound transport systems, but everything has been run down.

This government has constipation of ideas and finds comfort in creating a crisis for political expediency. You can not have command agriculture, command economy, command politics, command transport and this and that. The transport system is an economic enabler, so it should be fixed.

Mnagagwa cannot talk about an upper middle class economy by 2030 with such a run-down and an ailing transport system.

Leonard Koni