Government buildings crumbling and in pathetic state - Minister

GOVERNMENT buildings around the country are crumbling and in serious need of renovation and rehabilitation as they pose a serious hazard to occupants, a Cabinet minister has said.

Public works Minister Gabuza Joel Gabbuza also revealed that due to limited financial resources the government was struggling to address the backlog of unfinished government projects.

The minister was talking on the sidelines of the commissioning of incinerators and boilers at Mpilo Central hospital last Wednesday.

He said there was an urgent need for government to invest more in renovating their properties as some of their buildings were now in a pathetic state.

"While it's not all the government buildings that need attention most of them are in a critical condition, some have gone for years without any renovation or any form of rehabilitation, a normal building must at least be repainted every five years but some of these government buildings were last repainted ages ago," said the minister.

He said the most affected were civil servants' houses which were fast becoming a hazard to the occupants as government could not afford repairing them.

"Our major constraint is the lack of resources, that's why you find we can't repair civil servants' houses anymore at the end of the day these houses end up in a very critical condition, to be frank government is really lagging behind in the public works and it is clearly a cause of concern," said Minister Gabbuza.

The minister said they were moving to try and repair major government buildings, especially those that were used by the public, in a bid to address this problem.

"We are targeting the critical offices, those that have the highest traffic inclusive of the registry offices, government complexes and hospitals. due to lack of resources we cannot go for an overhaul of the entire buildings but we have to focus on those few.

"We are also in the process of engaging private companies through the Private Public Partnerships so that they can help us rehabilitate our buildings and I can tell you it is slowly paying dividends because companies like PPC have already stepped in to rehabilitate the United Bulawayo Hospitals and Mpilo Hospital. if more companies could come in then our burden would be slightly reduced," said Minister Gabbuza.

Turning to the backlog Minister Gabbuza said while the figure was at 550 they were making strides to ensure that they finish some of the projects as they had seen that it was more expensive to leave a project unfinished than to just channel resources to its completion.

"The major problem is that when such projects are not complete by the time we re-commission them most of the equipment that was left onsite is either stolen or broken down thus it becomes difficult to budget.

"Besides what should be done is that when a project is funded it should be funded to completion, we should not start a project when we don't have the money because at the end of the day we will have a pile up of these uncompleted projects," he said.

The Minister said if the government continued starting new projects they would instead lose a lot of money because when they were left unfinished a lot of building material would be destroyed or stolen.

He said at the moment his Ministry needed US$46 million to complete 120 priority projects and effectively reduce the backlog.

"I am however, pleased that we are slowly reducing the backlog, if we could get a steady flow of funds we could even do much better, what's posing a problem is the unavailability of funds," he said.