$600 million needed for road rehabilitation

The Zimbabwean Government is seeking $600 million for the rehabilitation of roads in Harare.

George Munyonga, chief engineer of works says that the Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme has a long way to go in addressing problems in most of the public transport routes.

Out of 130kms of road, 60km have already been completed, while work is ongoing on the remaining 30km.

“We received funding of about $12.9 million from Zinara allocations and we also received $2,8 million for the hot spots programme which is going to cover initially areas in Mbare, but we are going to extend it to other areas. We also received $4.1 m from the Ministry of Finance which we used to carry out works in high order roads,” said Munyonga.

“All in all, we are working with around $22 million including what we carried over from our allocation from last year, about $2.8 million. If we finish our allocation early we can ask our city fathers for permission to look for more funds. The city is also not stationary, we are looking for an excess of $600 million in order to bring our roads to a manageable state,”he said.

“We are also going to be attending to the side roads for Crowborough Way. This is the first phase for this programme and we hope that in the second phase we will be attending to all those other roads we have not been attending to,” he added.

"We will also be attending to Hinn Road where we have been having a lot of muggings due to reduced traffic speeds that happen when roads are badly damaged,” said Munyonga.