Road rehab gets thumbs up

HARARE City Council has started rehabilitating roads in some high-density suburbs which were now heavily potholed.

Council is carrying out repairs in Mbare, Sunningdale and Warren Park, just to mention a few.

The move was yesterday welcomed by the Harare Residents Trust.

HRT director Mr Precious Shumba told The Herald: “This development is coming at a time when most motorists had experienced challenges and are spending a lot of money on vehicle maintenance due to the heavily potholed roads.”

He urged Government to ensure equitable distribution of money by the Zimbabwe National Roads Administration to enable council to repair roads.

Mr Shumba slammed council’s parking system.

“The city parking has been largely controlled by unaccountable people, including corrupt management and a few councillors and this has seen funds from city parking not being transparently remitted to the city treasury for accounting purposes”, he said.

Mr Shumba also castigated some road contractors hired by council.

“HRT urges the City of Harare to put up visible road signs to adequately advice motorists and pedestrians of the ongoing road rehabilitation exercise in order to curtail unnecessary accidents.

“In most of the roads, the contractors are too relaxed and this means they take a longer time than necessary to complete the road works. Motorists too have a duty to respect the ongoing road works and abide by road regulations.

In an interview with The Herald yesterday, Harare city council director of works Engineer Zvenyika Chawatama said rehabilitation of city roads was an ongoing exercise.

“We have a number of targeted roads in the residential areas in order to improve accessibility in those areas as some roads were unreachable due bad roads network,” he said. — Herald Reporter.