…as Councillors threatens actions on dozing engineering department staff
Tinaani Nyabereka
MIDLANDS – Gweru City Council Mayor Hamutendi Kombayi has ordered the local authority to buy a new grader as the road network in the city are in a deplorable state.
He said a number of roads were bad and inaccessible in wards as the grader and tippers for gravelling purposes were hardly allocated schedules to work in residential areas.
“Roads are hardly being graded and tippers don’t have a proper schedule, what is happening. Instead of telling us about the broken grader, go and buy a new grader. We need to hear of this next month.” he said
Ward 8 Councillor, Notai Dzika said the schedules for gravelling roads was not transparent.
“I want the engineer to tell us how the grader and tippers is working. I don’t understand the time allocated to each ward in terms of getting these vehicles to work.
“We are afraid to present schedules to residents as things change anytime. Give us the proper information so that we inform our people well,” He said.
Gweru City Council Director of Engineering, Masauso Store said the challenges which was affecting the distribution of gravel was the availability of resources.
“Am not sure if we have councillors who have not received gravel in their wards but we made sure that all wards are covered but the challenge we have is that those tippers need a lot of fuel, for the tippers to operate the whole day they need more than 100litres per truck, so we don’t have much, we need resources to fully operate,” said Store.
Ward 3 councillor, Doubt Ncube however said there was need to tighten screws on management as most people in the engineering department as sleeping on duty.
“We have a lot of people who are sleeping on duty on the management side. Roads are bad because we are not getting the truth. We go and lay complaints about roads but nothing is being done,”
“Many a times I have relayed complaints about my ward to the engineers but it’s shocking that none has been attended to. Where are we going as a city if that is the situation? I therefore implore this council to employ strict measures which needs someone to go home if need be.” Said Ncube.
However, Ward 4 Councillor, Martin Chivhoko bemoaned selection criteria for roads that goes under Emergency Roads Rehabilitation Program (ERRP) as some areas were lagging.
“Some of the roads need to be adopted under the ERRP, we have a lot of roads being skipped in a number of wards because we don’t know the criteria being used in selecting the roads.” he added.
Despite roads, Gweru continues to face a number of depreciating infrastructure including traffic lights with some being none functional for a number of years now
