Political activist and investigative journalist Hopewell Chin’ono criticized the government of Zimbabwe for failing to modernise roads due to the mismanagement of public funds and lack of foresight.
Zimbabwe’s road infrastructures is currently under the rehabilitation after more than 40 years.
On his X handle account Chin’ono wrote the following :
Yesterday I drove to Westgate through Lomagundi Road now renamed Nemakonde.
The road is being expanded because of the new parliament and the supposedly new city.
What caught my eye is the space on the left of this picture which is being used for expansion.
You see, the colonials left these open spaces exactly for that, road expansion, but we turned them into Car Sales and markets🤣🤣🤣
It is only 44 years later that we start using one of them because the political elites want to drive without being delayed when going to parliament.
These areas are everywhere on main roads like Enterprise or Mutare Road in Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare.
The current roads were built when the capital city had 150,000 people, today it has over 3 million people, but very little road expansion has happened although the city’s population has massively grown.
Like Lomagundi Road, the ZANUPF regime only expands roads when a big politician like Robert Mugabe lives in that area as they did back then, or when the politicians need it as they do for the parliament.
These roads should have been progressively expanded in the last 44 years of independence, that is what happens in a normal country with a competent government, but not in Zimbabwe.
These politicians and their kids are building shopping centres in city neighbourhoods increasing the volume of traffic for instance on Enterprise Road, but the roads are not being expanded, yet the land for that expansion is there.
This is not caused only by a lack of vision or craft competence, but by the looting of public funds that were meant to fund road expansion programmes across the country.
If the colonial government was corrupt and incompetent as the current regime has been, we would not have had good infrastructure like hospitals, schools and even roads.
This regime has failed to just maintain what it inherited from the colonial government, sadly there is no organised push back to this failure and looting and plunder!
The massive population growth without proportional infrastructure development has been caused by just one thing, a corrupt government with no national interest.
The mismanagement of public funds and lack of foresight are issues that future leaders will have to grapple with and tackle if Zimbabwe is going to compete with other modern States around us!
Source Newsreportzim.com
