Welcome to Zimbabwe Cde President

Last week on Friday, President Robert Mugabe officially opened the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) in Bulawayo and his abysmal shock over the state of the roads in Bulawayo was a kick in the teeth for many people in the country.

To many Zimbabweans it was disconcerting as this showed that President Mugabe has lost touch with what is happening on the ground, ostensibly because of his old age.

President Mugabe said about the roads in Bulawayo: "I was looking at the road from the airport to here. It was as if it was made in 1924 when I was born. If you put a bit of cement on it to level it, decorate it and put a bit of shoulders to the roads as other do".

And on Sunday, The Standard newspaper cartoonist, Nutshell summed it up all with the cartoon strip, titled, ‘Mugabe Horrified by State of Roads'. In the cartoon strip, Nutshell captures a probable conversation between President Mugabe and his pilot in which he asked: "What are those?" and the pilot answered: "Potholes Cde President".

Disturbingly though, this however was the last thing many Zimbabweans expected to hear from President Mugabe as what he saw in Bulawayo is a true picture of the state of the roads across the whole country, even in the capital, Harare. President Mugabe's statement made news headlines the following day because it was deplorable that the ‘dear leader' did not know the bad state of the country's road networks. Of course South African President Jacob Zuma (remember his recent gaffe about Malawian roads) could have been forgiven for making such remarks, not our own president whom we expect to lead the country's economic turnaround strategy. And the Zanu PF government's five year economic blue print –the Zimbabwe Agenda for Socio Economic Transformation (ZIM-ASSET) emphasizes on the need to improve the country's infrastructure which include the road network. How then can these roads be improved when our leader does not know the state of our roads?

The question many people are asking is: Is our President not aware of the state of our roads or he was simply trying to allot blame to the MDC-T led Bulawayo city council? If President Mugabe wanted ordinary people to shift blame from his government to the city country then it was an own goal of the part of the presidency. And this raised many questions. If President Mugabe does not know the state of the roads in Bulawayo city, the second largest city in the country, how can he be expected to know what is happening in rural Mahenye, Dotito and some other remote rural areas? Or simply he was trying to tell Zimbabweans that what is happening in Bulawayo is the responsibility of the MDC-T elected council not the central government?

Imagine President Mugabe only travelled for a short distance from the airport to the ZITF grounds for only a few minutes in a highly comfortable Mercedes Benz (Zim 1), what more for ordinary Zimbabweans who are using these bad roads everyday in packed kombis without shock absorbers? Or some motorists who have to navigate these roads in their second hand vehicles imported from the Japan.  And when people say President Mugabe must step down and make way for a younger and vibrant leader, it is only for the love of the country and he must not go ballistic blaming imaginary enemies from the West. But how can we expect our roads, which are central to the development of the country, to be maintained and rehabilitated when the president does not even know that they are in such a bad state. Understandably our President normally travels by air, but someone in cabinet should tell him that what he experienced in Bulawayo is what is obtaining across the whole country both in urban and rural areas. Roads are in bad state with every inch of the whole network of the country's roads papered with potholes. What irks many motorists is that they are paying toll fees but there is little improvement on the state of the roads.

At the same occasion he mourned the rising statistics of road accidents and by acknowledging that, he should have known that the poor state of our roads was contributing to the high road carnage.  While we don't expect President Mugabe to know every pothole (considering there are millions of such potholes) in the country, he should have a general idea of how things are on the ground. Hopefully when he goes back to cabinet, he will find time to ask the Minister of Transport, Obert (The Obedient Son) Mpofu on the state of the country's roads.

However in the mean time: "Welcome to Zimbabwe Cde President!"