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| Wellington Mahwende |
Brighton
Chiseva
MASVINGO
– The recent rains received in Masvingo
have caused a huge damage to roads in the high density suburb of Victoria Ranch
rendering the majority of them unusable causing an outcry amongst motorists and
residents.
Remainder of Victoria Ranch Consortium
chairperson, Wellington Mahwende said they were worried by the deplorable state
of the roads and said plans were underway to rehabilitate the roads starting in
April this year.
Mahwende said they were sending a
tender invitation for the construction of roads and said works are expected to
begin at the end of the rain season.
“Our roads are in a sorry state and
currently we cannot do any regular maintenance like grading because of the
rains but once the surface dries we will put a grader to do maintenance,” said
Mahwende.
Mahwende, who is also one of the chief
land developers in Victoria Ranch, said they were in the process of looking for
a contactor to service the roads by April.
“We are putting an advert calling for
tenders to construct standard roads in the suburb and construction should start
as soon as possible. We hope by April we would have put everything in place to
start the construction,” said Mahwende.
He said contrary to grapevine
information, people in Victoria Ranch had not paid for road construction fees but
were going to be engaged once a suitable contractor had been found.
“Many people believe that we have
charged our people for roads but we haven’t. We are going to do so when we find
a suitable contractor and residents will be paying directly to the contactor so
that there won’t be cases of misappropriation of funds.”
said Mahwende
He also said the Remainder of Victoria
Ranch Consortium had 14 housing cooperatives which were selling stands to their
clients but in terms of services they unite and do it together for it is
difficult for each and every cooperative to do roads or sewer works on its own.
“After getting quotations from the
contractors, we will then divide the amount with the number of households we
have and each household will pay towards the service.
“We did the same process when we laid
the ground work for water connections and we had a standing agreement with the
city council to supply water for at least three days a week.
“The agreement has unfortunately
faulted owing to the water challenges in the city,” said Mahwende.
He said they had done about 50 percent
of the sewer system in the area but could not continue with it because they
could not test if the gradient will be able to push the sewer to the main line
and were waiting for the city council to do the test for them before they
continue.
“We stopped the sewer project midway because
we are waiting for the trunk sewer to be completed.
“We don’t know if the sewer will have
pressure to flow to the main sewer line so we engaged city council and they
said they have an alternative way of testing and once that has been done, we
will continue because the material is already there,” said Mahwende.
