TENDAI BHEBE IN BULAWAYO
Councillors in the city of Bulawayo have raised concern over poor workmanship by contractors rehabilitating roads across the city.
ZINARA recently released about ZWL$93bn to go towards road rehabilitation and maintenance in the city’s roads.
But, it emerged during a recent full council meeting that a shoddy job was being done by the contractors contracted under the government’s Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme (ERRP).
The ERRP is running for three years and ends in February 2024.
Ward 3 councillor Silas Chigora raised the red flag.
“Our jet patcher is not doing a good job. If you go around town following where it was used about a month or two ago, the potholes would have resurfaced. An example is along Robert Mugabe and 11th Avenue.
“That pothole was fixed not more than a month ago but it has resurfaced. The same happened along 6th Avenue and in less than a month there is no trace that the road was ever fixed before. We need to introspect, is the jet patcher effective?” Chigora asked.
The council has said most of its roads have outlived their lifespan and requires US$700m to rehabilitate them.
He said potholes were causing road traffic accidents in the city.
“Maybe it is a mixture problem or a human problem. There is a better way of fixing potholes. May we look into it. We are not doing the work correctly. I have also reported the dangerous potholes at Ascot that are at a curve,” Chigora said.
Deputy mayor Mlandu Ncube said: “ They went to Luveve road and messed up. They did a substandard job. The engineering committee used its coffers to fix the road.”
Bad road network has forced some public transport operators in Cowdray Park high density suburb to abandon some of the routes in the suburb which they said were damaging their cars.
