The Minister of Transport and Infrastructural Development Felix Mhona has ordered Fossil Contracting to redo the resurfacing of Lorraine Drive road in Harare due to substandard work.
This came out during a Q and A session in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, on Wednesday.
Mhona’s directive came in response to a public outcry about the road’s poor condition, even though it had been resurfaced recently.
Nyanga South MP, Supa Mandiwanzira (ZANU PF), in a supplementary question, said the state of Lorraine Drive did not show it was recently rehabilitated. He said (via NewZimbabwe.com):
My supplementary question relates to the standard and quality of the roads that are being made. Because of the great work that is being done to fix and make the roads to this Parliament Building, we are now having to use some roads that we did not use often. We know that some of these roads were recently upgraded at the government’s pace.
For instance, this afternoon, I drove through Lorraine Drive, but the state of that road does not indicate that this road was recently upgraded.
Minister, to what extent is the ministry supervising the standard and the quality of the roads that are being built?
Are there funds being retained on the amounts that are due to the contractors that within a specific period, if the road does not stand or withstand the demands of time, those resources are used to fix those roads?
In response to Mandiwanzira, Minister Mhona conceded that the contractor had done a shoddy job. He said:
For the past weeks, it was topical during our debates and social media circulations where the road (Lorraine Drive) failed dismally.
As a ministry, we have summoned the contractor, who has also acknowledged that yes, the road failed.
For us, we are saying under the Second Republic, we do not pay when the work is not done properly.
We have instructed the contractor to work on the road and take corrective measures where the system failed and the type of bituminous products used collapsed.
Fossil has learnt from that experience and it is not the only road that the contractor has been working on. As we see, the contractor has been attending to several roads across the country.
The terrain and the nature of the soils and how the road collapsed are something that we interrogated.
We have agreed that the contractor will take remedial action. We are saying this because we have our engineers and the public is there to take us into account.
We are grateful that yes, we are making corrections and we endeavour, as we progress and construct our roads so that we do not have such a recurrence in terms of road maintenance.
Mhona said Fossil is also working on Nemakonde Road (Lomagundi Road) and will revert to Lorraine Drive once the other one is done.
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