Harare - President Robert Mugabe has been jolted to launch a highway dualisation road project after South Africa and other countries threatened to unveil a new road network to by-pass Zimbabwe because of the poor state of its roads.
Mugabe launched the US$1 Billion Beitbridge - Harare - Chirundu highway project on Thursday. The road facilitates trade and the movement of millions of people between Southern Africa and Central, North and East.
The Beitbridge-Chirundu Highway, long on government’s agenda for dualisation, is in a poor state, causing the deaths of hundreds of people.
Reports suggest that the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) countries were now planning a new route to by-pass Zimbabwe because of the poor state of the highway, a situation that would see the country losing missions in annual revenue.
On Thursday, Mugabe blamed sanctions for his government’s failure to upgrade the highway.
“Because our country has been under sanctions for more than a decade and a half, our infrastructure has deteriorated”.
“We face several challenges in our attempts to secure lines of credit. Thus when funding such as that for this project has been secured, we cannot ever afford to maintain a business as usual approach to work,” Mugabe said at the launch of the dualisation project in Chirumanzu, Midlands province.
As a gateway for Zimbabwe’s $3 billion trade with South Africa and many other northern countries dependent on it, the dualisation project has been earmarked for rehabilitation since 2002.
A Sadc assessment of the road infrastructure in the region showed that a third of Zimbabwe’s road network was in a parlous state. The Beitbridge-Chirundu Road was singled out as one of the roads that needed rehabilitation because of its importance in the region.
