No payment to contractors who do shoddy work –Govt

Harare, (New Ziana) -The Zimbabwe government stands forquality and will not pay contractors who carry out shoddy work, a Cabinet Minister has said.

Transport and Infrastructure Development Minister Felix Mhona said this at the official opening of a section of Nemakonde Road (formerly Lomagundi Road) to traffic on Tuesday.

He said while the contractor did a perfect job, he did shoddy work on Lorraine and Harare Drive and has been ordered to redo that section.

“We are actually excited as a Ministry and what is exciting is when wedo good you won’t see it being showcased especially by the Fourth Estate, but if we fail to do well on a single road the matter is blown out of proportion.”

“Today we are going to see a well-worked out road and we will also see a bad road. I think this is unique, a bad road on another section that was being done by another contractor along Harare Drive. And it’s quite a sorry state and I can say this again.”

Mhona said the Second Republic had resolved not to pay for any poorly done work the contractors know that their payments will not be processed when do a shoddy job, adding that gone were the days when contractors were being paid before finishing their work.

“So, what we are saying is you will see the section that is not done properly and we will then mandate the contractor to re-do and for those who were following in Parliament, we also had another section from Fossil again which is Lorraine Drive and I assured the august House that we are going to revisit as soon as we re-open this section you see the contractor moving to re-do Lorraine Drive,” he said, adding like in any profession, a procedure can go wrong, but the government does not condone such practices.

Mhona dismissed comments that the government was sprucing up the roads because of the impending Southern African Development Community Heads ofState and Government summit slated for August in Zimbabwe noting that there were several other road rehabilitation programmes that the government was rolling out throughout the country.

He cited the Ruwangwa area in Nyanga, Manicaland province where the government was constructing a state-of-the-art road, as well as Bulawayo, where Leeds Road was also under rehabilitation, although the SADC leaders will not visit those places.

The government was also focusing on topical roads such as the Harare-Beitbridge Road, Bulawayo Victoria Falls Road, which are very significant in terms of the country’s economic performance as the government focused on key economic enablers in its drive to attain an upper-middle income society by 2030.

“We haven’t forgotten the Bulawayo Victoria Falls Road. We are now doing the adjudication. We want to go for a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) arrangement to cover the 760 km road,” he said, adding soon the government would be getting contractors to work with on a PPP basis.

New Ziana