Of Zimbos and grand projects

ZIMBABWEANS seem to have a fascination with figures, usually unverified and unverifiable figures. It is very common to come across the“five million”Zimbabweans who are living in the Diaspora, or that 1,8 million Zimbabweans are living positively, or that it costs at least a million US dollars to construct a kilometre of tarred road.

Whilst it cannot be disputed that there are “several”Zimbabweans resident outside the country, how and why the five million figure came about is a mystery. Because some of them used unofficial exit points and some of them have since come back home.

Whereas the door-to-door HIV campaign is yet to gain traction, we already“know”that 1,8 million are living positively. Thumb-suck figure? Where and when was the census for the HIV- positive done?

Then the most abused kilometre cost – like, one million Benjamins for a thousand metres?

How and where these figures are plucked from is anyone’s guess.

But there is another fascination: state-ofthe-art facilities that we are building or will build but which never get to see the light of day. The Philip Chiyangwa Stadium, state-ofthe-art and located, of all places, in Harare South, is the latest in a long-running list of the wishes that we have in the recent years. And as if fate would have it, Chiyangwa is at the epicentre of most of these“projects”that never seem to see the light of day.

Let us run down the wish list.

In July 2016, Zimbabweans woke up to the news that global hotel brand, the Radison Blu Hotel, was coming to Harare. According to the reports then, the hotel was supposed to open doors to the public in three years’time, that should have been in 2019.

For effect, the famous eatery along Samora Machel Avenue was razed to the ground. Farai Jere, the CAPS United supremo, was said to be behind the project.

If construction had really taken off, the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, on his last visit to the country, might have stayed in the facility. But lush savannah grass, given the recent increase in rainfall activity, has taken over sections of the golf course that was closed as we sought to build one of the biggest global brands in leisure accommodation.

And where the Radison Blu should be standing today, only the blue horizon of Eastlea suburb meets the eye on any given morning.

The recent announcement by Chiyangwa, of building his own stadium, might have been inspired, for want of a better word, by the Harare City Council which announced in February 2019 that it was harbouring plans of building a“state-of-the-art”stadium between Mufakose and Budiriro.

According to their projections, the stadium project was to take some four years to complete.

Those of a sober mind would have wondered why and how the council is embarking on such an ambitious project when council-owned Gwanzura Stadium lies derelict. Or why a fancy stadium instead of upgrading the“ceremonial home of football”, Rufaro Stadium.

Back to Chiyangwa, his “Theatre of Dreams” in Southlea Park, should pale into insignificance when one considers that he has proposed to build a “state-of-the-art” shopping mall just next to the National Sports Stadium, opposite the Warren Park dump site.

Never mind the choice of location, a shopping mall next to a dump site. Or was it on top of the dump site?

That was eons ago and a visit to the area will show a shed, which is said to be a supermarket in the making. Churches are now taking turns to hire out the shed for their Sunday services.

The shopping mall, which was touted to rival Sam Levy’s further east of the city or Old Mutual’s Westgate, is nowhere in sight. The Warren Park dumpsite still remains operational, though.

Then next to his imposing White House in Borrowdale’s Crowhill Road, is yet another of his dreams, a“state-of-the-art”hotel, which was meant to accommodate players and visitors to the South African World Cup soccer jamboree in 2010.

That the hotel lies unfinished and inhabitable, a decade after the World Cup, should speak volumes of his ambitions. The World Cup has, since 2010, gone to Brazil (2014) and Russia (2018) and will be in Qatar in 2022.

Maybe, a huge maybe, the hotel would be ready by then to host, you guessed right, not visitors to the quadrennial event but the next high-profile soccer leader to come to Zimbabwe. Maybe Ceferin when he comes back.

What makes the Chiyangwa announcement of building an all-purpose stadium all the more worrying is that it was made in the same week that Africa was mourning Dr Richard Maponya, a doyen in black entreneurship.

In September 2007, former South African president, Nelson Mandela, opened the R650-million Maponya Mall, located in Soweto.

Promoted to glory on January 6, at the ripe age of 99, Dr Maponya, walked the talk when it came to black empowerment and investment. His highly acclaimed mall was the first such shopping centre in Soweto and the first to be blacked-owned.

We shall not labour the reader with details of the ill-fated Gwanda solar project, which all things being equal, should be helping alleviate the power deficit that the country is facing, suffice to say that Kenya has since commissioned its wind-powered farm.

Located 600 to the north of Nairobi, construction of the Lake Turkana Wind Power farm began in October 2014 and was completed in July 2017 but only commissioned by Uhuru Kenyatta two years later, in July 2019. The farm consists of 365 turbines with a capacity to generate 310 megawatts of power.

Hopefully as 2020 begins to take shape, Zimbabweans will dispense with the habit of throwing around figures, like Karikoga Kaseke’s“two million”people who attended the carnival the other year, or the construction of “state-of-the-art” facilities in and around the country.

We should try to emulate Dr Maponya, from rose from selling clothes on a “wearnow and pay-later”arrangement, to becoming one of Africa’s most iconic investors.