Gweru residents and motorists have called on the city council to revert to gravel roads as the local authority was failing to rehabilitate tarred roads across the City.
By Bronfenbrenner Torubanda
Motorists who play the town-via-Mambo route said this after they saw the desperate move by Council to rehabilitate the poor roads using decomposed gravel sand to fill the worrying potholes.
One of the commuter operators Tatenda Nkomo said the sand which was put by council to rehabilitate roads was useless as it was not durable given that the rain season was still on.
“The City Council should stop wasting time and resources putting blinkers on our eyes because this sand they are putting will not help anything.The roads are terribly poor and we need long term solutions since we now don’t have roads in Mkoba,” said Nkomo.
Nkomo said it was better for the local authority to remove all the tar and put gravel roads in Mkoba instead of filling the potholes with sand.
A Mkoba resident who uses the road to commute to work Tawanda Shiri said the state of roads was deplorable and he reiterated that Council must remove the tar and replace it with gravel roads.
“The state of our roads is frustrating and this is a clear sign that we are residing in a failed City.The City council has drastically failed to maintain the roads and if they fail to put gravel roads other areas in Mkoba will be no go areas”, said Shiri.
Another motorist Samsom Moyo said the state of the roads was a clear demonstration of the incompetence of the local authority in terms of service delivery.
“The poor roads are tacit evidence that the Council is highly incompetent and useless.Not only do we have poor roads but other services like garbage and refuse collection and even access to safe drinking water remain unresolved,” said Moyo.
He said that the whole tar was supposed to be removed and there was need for road re-construction in order to ensure a more permanent solution.
“We need a complete renovation not this decomposed sand, pothole refilling. This is an insult on our intelligence because the City council cannot tell us that this is how they are using our tax money yet you will hear them pronouncing a very big budget,” said Moyo.
A pedestrian who passed through the heaps of decomposed gravel sand along the Mkoba road said they were both ashamed and embarrassed to be Mkoba residents due to the poor state of the roads.
“As residents we are so embarrassed to be Mkoba residents and we feel ashamed to be Zimbabweans. Yes we are a peaceful nation but the local authority must stay committed to its obligations and perform its mandate to the people,” said Justice Sibanda.
Gweru City Roads Engineer Beauty Chimedza said the City council was trying to address the problem in most roads in the City.
“We are doing tar-pothole refilling and gravel pothole refilling as a temporary measure to address the problem. The problem is we currently do not have sufficient funds to do re-sealing after patching as this is very expensive,” said Chimedza.
She said that gravel roads were expensive to maintain given that the design line for most of the roads were low cost surfacing which were only durable for 5 years and there was need for resurfacing which needed a budget of about $17 million.
“We have low coast surfaced roads and there is need for re-construction of roads which need about $17 million but we only received about $470 000 for the whole year. So we have no choice but to use temporary measures until we get sufficient funds,” said Chimedza.
This development took place against a background of the recent suspension of Gweru Town Clark and other top council officials over allegations of corruption and misappropriation of council funds.
