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TRANSPORT is one of the critical building blocks of any modern economy and the widespread neglect of roads in recent years is being addressed in a major way with the second year of the three-year Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme 2 already in full swing.

The scale of this programme can be seen from the $17 billion budget this year. This is in addition to the $16 billion of normal budget, the money from the Zimbabwe National Road Administration, with the Government, through Parliament, effectively more than doubling the amount to be spent, so allowing a lot of catch up work.

Last year saw the Government not just maintaining it’s programme in rural areas and along national highways, but finding a loophole in the local government law, which gives independence to municipalities for things like city roads, by declaring the appalling state of urban roads a national disaster, which was at that time a reasonable description.

The Zinara funds are automatically spread across the country. Licence fees, and the police are certainly ensuring these are now collected, tend to be distributed according to where the licensed vehicles are based, so towns and cities get the bulk of this cash. 

The toll fees, paid by those who use the network of roads, tend to go on the national highways and longer and so rural feeder roads.

The extra budget from the Treasury is fairly distributed where it is most needed, so everyone gets a share. One interesting point is that the Government is acting as a national Government rather than playing politics. 

Most of the repairs, rebuilding and new building of urban roads are done on the roads that run through constituencies won by opposition parties in recent elections, including the set of by-elections last month, but that work continues with a high priority this year.

What is now most important is that there is central planning and policy through the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development. 

It is impossible to fix everything simultaneously, but with a co-ordinated plan running over three years the bits will all fit together.

Some of the progress comes from earlier work in the Second Republic.

Zinara is the obvious example which had to be reformed and rebuilt itself, and the corruption that was endemic rooted out, so it was both collecting the licence fees and the tolls and was spending the low allocated percentage on administration.

This means that the money it collects goes largely on roads, rather than into pockets.

The problem of councils, basically urban councils, sidetracking Zinara money into other accounts has also been stopped and Zinara has made it clear it wants to see the accounts of the road accounts before it hands out any more cash.

At the same time the contracting has been tightened up. By now the Transport Ministry knows who can be on the approved list of suppliers and road buildings and who needs to excluded, or at least closely watched. There have been the odd duds, but we learn. 

The days when someone was given contracts for being a brother-in-law are over and very precise contracts, specifying exactly what needs to be done and by when are now the norm.

The contractors, who are paid by the kilometre not the week, are also becoming more efficient and so packing in more work each week, with of course the inspector coming round to check on just what they are doing so no one cheats or skimps.

Although a lot of progress has already been made and some quite ambitious plans have been announced for this year, it might take more than this year and next year to catch up on the years of neglect and the programme could well have to continue.

At the same time, the local authorities who are supposed to take a lead in road maintenance at least, need to get their act together, or have their act put together by the Transport and Local Government Ministries. 

Many rural district councils are already doing this. Along with clinics and schools the road graders, an expensive item, feature in the spending of devolution funds as these councils respond actively to pressure from their residents, who all want usable roads, ones that can bring trucks and buses to their farms. 

Now urban councils have to follow suit and get their act together. While arterial roads and the main link roads have been, or are being, rebuilt by the Emergency Government programme, driving off the highway into a suburb is generally a nightmare. 

Not only have some quite decent roads built last century been neglected, but also some of the more modern suburban roads were built to an exceptionally low standard and have fallen to bits in less than a decade.

Fairly obviously some more modern councils were prepared to either accept low standards from developers, or were quite unable to enforce standards their professionals set. Or perhaps some of the road money was diverted. 

The emergency programme in rural areas ties in with the inputs and marketing schemes set up by Government, or backed by Government. It is not much use giving inputs and providing guaranteed markets for surpluses if the lorries cannot get to the farms reasonably easily. 

It is the same in urban areas. The emergency programme by Government has given the desperate attention required to roads that can move materials into factory areas and goods out and get the workforce to and from work.

Harare City Council had done a bit of work before the Government took over, but just on roads in Borrowdale, Greendale and Highlands which was all very nice but hardly the most critical.

Again fixing public transport and buying regular batches of new buses for Zupco requires that the roads these buses use are usable and that we are not seeing buses off the road each month waiting for a new set of shock absorbers.