Zinara renews commitment to fix roads

THE Zimbabwe National Road Administration (Zinara) says it will plug all revenue leakages and prioritise improving the country's dilapidated road network.

Addressing the 5th Zinara annual general meeting yesterday, Zinara chairperson George Manyaya said the era of bad corporate governance and corruption at the road authority was over.

Over the years, Auditor-General, Mildred Chiri has exposed gross malpractices at the road authority which  resulted in the loss of millions of dollars.

Manyaya yesterday said Zinara was undergoing a massive clean-up exercise, which involves reconstituting the organisation's board of directors and executives.

He said in inflation adjusted terms, Zinara reported a net surplus of $4,1 billion in 2020, up from $1,5 billion in 2019.

"Misappropriation and abuse of funds is a thing of the past," he said. "The shareholder cleaned up the board which was also tasked with cleaning up the management team now headed by Fintech guru Nkosinathi Ncube.

"The new executive team has been working very hard to adhere to various recommendations from the audits that were carried out and from Parliament as well. Their focus is on transparency, improving staff performance and culture, and coming up with mechanisms and policies that improve performance of the organisation."

Representative of the Public Accounts Committee and chairperson of the African Parliamentarians Against Corruption Themba Mliswa urged Zinara to follow up on disbursed funds to ensure contractors do their work.

Zinara finance director Adam Zvandasara said the organisation had not been spared by the country's exchange rate crisis.

"We can't review toll fees every week like what happens with the exchange rate, and so we have come up with our own internal formula which tracks movement based on 10 percentage points. For example, if the rate is $110:US$1, we wait and only review when it hits US$122," Zvandasara said, adding that Zinara did not deal directly with contractors.