How come Smith constructed and maintained good roads yet we’re failing even with toll fees?

Tendai Ruben Mbofana

To comprehend the full scale of Zimbabwe’s infrastructure crisis, one needs only to step onto virtually any road in the country.

***To directly receive my articles please join my WhatsApp Channel on: ***https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08

The collapse is not localized to a single highway or a single region.

It is systemic, pervasive, and suffocating daily life from primary inter-city corridors down to suburban residential streets.

In Harare, residential suburbs are mapped by deep ruts and jagged edges, forcing drivers to slalom onto oncoming lanes just to protect their suspensions.

In Bulawayo, major arteries like Luveve Road and Siyephambili Drive have suffered years of severe degradation.

In my hometown of Redcliff, once-tarred streets have decayed into razor-sharp trenches, while many have reverted back to plain dirt roads.

Meanwhile, regional transit corridors like the Bulawayo–Victoria Falls highway have deteriorated into dangerous obstacle courses.

This critical artery—leading to one of the natural wonders of the world—has become a national embarrassment, broken by years of neglect.

Though multi-million-dollar rehabilitation contracts have repeatedly been handed out to well-connected cronies, the work frequently stalls or falls apart, leaving motorists stranded on a highway that embodies the failure of our entire transport system.

Urban commuters, small-town residents, and long-distance freight operators alike share the exact same reality: navigating a crumbling road network that destroys vehicles, slows commerce, and costs lives.

This nationwide ruin inevitably forces a painful yet unavoidable comparison.

Decades ago, Ian Smith’s administration constructed and maintained a durable asphalt road network spanning the entire country without erecting a single toll gate.

There were no toll plazas stopping motorists every few hundred kilometers to collect hard currency, nor were there high-tech electronic boom gates.

Fast forward to the present day, and Zimbabwean motorists face an unrelenting barrage of mandatory user fees.

Drivers are subjected to quarterly vehicle licensing fees pegged directly to hard currency, embedded fuel levies on every liter of diesel and petrol, transit duties, local authority parking fees, and continuous charges across nearly thirty ZINARA toll plazas nationwide.

The central question demands an answer.

How did an isolated colonial regime build lasting highways and city streets without toll plazas, while our current administration fails so spectacularly despite swimming in a sea of motorist revenue?

The disparity does not stem from a shortage of cash, but from a complete breakdown in fiscal discipline, operational planning, and systemic governance.

Under the previous administration, road funding was tightly managed through direct, ring-fenced revenue allocations.

Taxes collected on fuel duties and vehicle registrations were channeled directly into dedicated accounts rather than being absorbed into general administrative budgets.

Minimal corruption, strict financial audits, and zero tolerance for the misappropriation of funds meant that nearly every dollar collected went straight into asphalt and infrastructure.

Crucially, maintenance was strictly preventative.

Small cracks and minor depressions were repaired immediately before seasonal rains could penetrate the sub-base and destroy the underlying foundation.

Furthermore, heavy bulk freight—coal, minerals, timber, and agricultural yields—was legally and operationally restricted to the national rail system, keeping destructive axle loads off both urban streets and inter-city highways.

Today, that operational framework has collapsed across every layer of government.

The breakdown of the national railway system has dumped thousands of heavy haulage trucks onto city avenues and national highways that were never engineered to bear continuous multi-ton loads.

But far worse than physical wear and tear is the structural rot inside the institutions responsible for road upkeep.

Year after year, reports from the Auditor-General and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee have exposed routine mismanagement, procurement irregularities, and unapproved executive allowances within ZINARA.

At the heart of this crisis is the corrupt awarding of highly inflated road construction and rehabilitation tenders to cronies of the ruling elite.

These favored contractors seldom perform up to standard.

Many projects are left uncompleted or completely abandoned, while newly rehabilitated roads develop gaping potholes within months of opening.

Instead of funding high-quality asphalt, bitumen, and stormwater drainage clearing, millions of dollars collected from motorists have historically disappeared into administrative overhead, executive luxury perks, and fake or failing contracts awarded to politically connected suppliers.

The crisis is equally rotten at the municipal level, where corrupt local authorities run lucrative revenue joints masquerading as traffic management.

Municipalities in Harare, Bulawayo, Kwekwe, and Gweru harvest millions of dollars monthly from aggressive parking fees, exorbitant clamping charges, towing operations, and local rates.

Yet, despite squeezing urban motorists daily, these councils display staggering levels of corruption, revenue leakage, and fiscal opacity.

Parking entities operate like private slush funds, with millions unaccounted for while city parking bays remain potholed, traffic lights remain dead, and urban storm drains remain choked with trash.

Instead of re-investing parking proceeds into basic road surfacing, council executives pay themselves inflated salaries, fund lavish procurement deals, and ignore routine maintenance.

When routine maintenance is skipped for years, roads inevitably reach structural failure, creating a multi-billion-dollar backlog that neither local rates nor central toll fees can fix.

It is a national disgrace that a country collecting hundreds of millions in direct motorist levies cannot keep its capital city streets or vital trade corridors in basic working order.

The stark contrast between past performance and present decay exposes an uncomfortable truth.

Functional infrastructure is not created by toll gates, levies, or emergency rehab slogans.

​It is built on fiscal integrity, technical competence, local authority empowerment, and an unyielding respect for public funds.

These are virtues that remain desperately absent from our road network management today.

• *Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or *

  [email protected]