Chiwenga embraces Chamisa's 'spaghetti roads'

VICE-PRESIDENT Constantino Chiwenga yesterday unwittingly embraced MDC Alliance presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa's "spaghetti roads" idea saying they were the only viable solution to the country's congested roads.

Addressing Zanu-PF supporters at Gwanzura Stadium in Highfields, Chiwenga said government had embarked on a project to improve the road infrastructure to facilitate easy movement of traffic.

"The government is currently on a project to improve road infrastructure. We want to ensure easy movement of people and goods. We want to create circle roads in Harare, without traffic coming through the CBD to ease congestion, it is now time to build fly overs," Chiwenga said.

Chamisa has indicated that the MDC Alliance government will go all out to improve the nation's roads to world class standards but the Zanu-PF leadership described his vision as "childish" by promising citizens the moon and things that did not benefit his home town.

Chiwenga recently lashed out at Chamisa for promising to create spaghetti roads and airports across the country, saying the youthful opposition leader should first address the issue of his legitimacy before "dreaming big".

"The voter has to read and decide the way from a well-cultured vision to follow, visions are deeper and more serious affair in transforming the nations, impacting the people, not childish dreams which excite rude passions, while not surviving even the most charitable settings. We hear childish talk like transforming the world into some place never lived in before. We hear the likes of bullet trains, spaghetti roads, rural airports, cellphones for animal kingdoms, all such and much more crazy ideas to come.

Until we ask ourselves why pretenders, who sell us such convoluted dummies, cannot manage small traffic in our real world in the cities and municipalities, which they control and run," Chiwenga told guests at a Zanu-PF manifesto launch recently.

Yesterday, Chiwenga said the government was negotiating with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to ensure that extortionist rates by mobile money transfer agents were reduced, attracting loud cheers from the crowd.

"We hear you on the issue of Ecocash rates and we assure you that we are working on it. The money that is being given to pensioners is a very small amount and we want that amount to be increased. We are talking with the Reserve Bank to reduce the rates," Chiwenga said.

He urged Highfields residents not to depart from the ways of the party's founding fathers who launched Zanu-PF in one of the country's oldest suburb.

Meanwhile, President Emmerson Mnangagwa has directed the Media, Information and Broadcasting Services and ICT and Cyber Security ministries to speed up the merging of the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) and Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) into one entity.

Speaking at the official opening of the Potraz headquarters in Harare yesterday, Mnangagwa said he wanted to move fast on technological convergence.

"My administration recently took a decision to merge Potraz and the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) in view of the technological convergence which has blurred the distinction of platforms in relation to services provided by these two institutions. This decision is expected to bring efficiency, effectiveness, ease of doing business and harnessing specialist skills with regards to the roles of Potraz and BAZ," he said.

He said the merger was one of several projects lined up to streamline and improve efficiency in parastatal performance.

In April this year, Cabinet approved the merger of the BAZ and Potraz in a move meant to improve technological convergence, which is increasingly prevalent in the information technology world across the globe and refers to the combination of two or more different technologies.