The Sunday Mail
TRANSPORT and Infrastructural Development Minister Felix Mhona recently appointed corporate governance expert, Dr George Manyaya, as board chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Road Administration (Zinara). The reconstitution of the parastatal’s board and Dr Manyaya’s appointment is expected to inject additional impetus into the ongoing road rehabilitation programme. Our Reporter Debra Matabvu (DM) spoke to Dr Manyaya (GM) who outlined his vision for the organisation.
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DM: You were recently appointed ZINARA board chairperson. What was your initial reaction to the news?
GM: Firstly, I am humbled and thankful to His Excellency the President Dr E.D Mnangagwa who has bestowed confidence in me by endorsing my appointment. Furthermore, I would like to proffer my sincere appreciation to the Minister of Transport and Infrastructural Development, Honourable Felix Mhona, for appointing me to lead this strategic organisation.
He has walked the talk by implementing the New Dispensation’s thrust of inclusivity by ensuring gender parity and youth involvement in national development.
As you may be aware, Zinara is a critical institution in the development of road infrastructure in Zimbabwe.
Its mandate is established by the Roads Act [Chapter 13:18] to, inter alia, fix road user charges, collect such charges or any other revenue of the Road Fund, manage, allocate and disburse such funds to road authorities in line with prescribed legislative and policy frameworks of corporate governance and fiscal prudence.
I am thus grateful for such an honour and privilege to be appointed as the chairperson of the board of directors for such a critical institution in the country.
The blending of skills diversity and age is a marvel.
If you look at it, almost half of my colleagues on the board are persons below 40 years, the likes of Advocate Kingston Magaya, Ms Angeline Matopodzi, Ms Brenda Nhliziyo and Engineer Ernest Shenje. These have been blended to experienced experts like Lizwe Bhunu, Reeds Dube, Irene Zindi and Alderman Naason Mudzara among others.
This speaks to what has always been echoed on various platforms that the Second Republic is determined to tap into the proficiency of all Zimbabweans to enhance nation building.
DM: Can you outline your assessment of the state of the parastatal when you took over?
GM: Now, as the new chairperson, I have hit the ground running from day one, by appreciating the scope of the work at Zinara; its systems, operations, human capital, work ethics, strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities to make it the robust road fund that it should be.
I am fast internalising Zinara’s operations, the key success factors and initiatives that have been, and that should be implemented to turn around the organisation. This includes the successes of the organisation and the attendant challenges.
In that vein, I can say when I came in, I was impressed that for all intents and purposes, the organisation has turned the corner in terms of transparency and accountability and the board has really been working hard to clean up the company in the past year or so.
In the past, audit reports concluded that Zinara’s operations were opaque and no one could really tell the modalities of their work in administering the road fund and how much and to whom they were disbursing the funds.
Their monitoring and evaluation frameworks were not known and their communication strategy was hazy.
For the first time, in 2021 Zinara published all the disbursements that it made to all the 92 road authorities that we have.
I can also share with you that more than $12 billion was disbursed in 2021, which enabled massive road works that you saw being undertaken under the auspices of the Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme 2 (ERRP2) across the country in 2021.
DM: May you please outline your vision for the organisation as you commence your new duties?
GM: As I take over as the chairperson, my vision is very simple.
My vision is to build a new Zinara that contributes meaningfully to the growth of our national economy in line with the ethos of Vision 2030 and the key aspirations of the National Development Strategy.
Infrastructure development is a key pillar of the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1) and I have already emphasised to my team that the year 2022 is a year of infrastructural revolution in our country.
My belief is that socio-economic development is largely underpinned by infrastructure development which includes world-class road networks because roads are an important component of the economy that facilitate the movement of goods and people.
It is my wish that during my tenure, I transform Zinara into an institution that I and all stakeholders will be proud of even after my tenure ends.
This then speaks to the issue of rebranding.
When I joined, the organisation had embarked on a rebranding journey, but we now want to give fresh impetus to that process.
The key thing is to change the work culture and reinforce that, as a public entity, we exist to serve the people.
Secondly, we need to introduce a robust communication strategy embracing transparency, accountability, disclosure and multi-stakeholder engagement so that all stakeholders are always abreast with our activities, therefore, leaving no place and no person behind.
Our engagement with the media fraternity should also be enhanced to a level where everyone knows the work that we are doing as Zinara, even where we make mistakes.
So, in short, my vision is to make Zinara a beacon of road infrastructure development in Zimbabwe.
DM: What areas have you prioritised for special attention as you commence your duties?
GM: My plate has always been full right from day one.
There are several issues that need to be addressed as we seek to improve our service to the public.
However, we cannot address everything overnight, but there are key pain points that require urgent attention.
My first key priority is to address congestion at the tollgates.
We need to come up with a robust and sustainable strategy to address congestion.
There are two key factors that cause congestion at the tollgates.
Firstly, we do not have fast payment mechanisms at the tollgates, like cash or tap and go cards, and we also don’t have adequate infrastructure at 22 tollgates out of the 31 tollgates that we have across the country.
Now, we need to develop our own payment system which is reliable and ensure that we move with time towards e-tolling.
In this regard, it means we need to look into the upgrading and updating of our ICT infrastructure and software solutions so as to increase operational efficiency in order to ensure speedy and flawless service to all customers.
We must harness the digital economy and use emerging technologies to counter leakages that are always being reported at some of our tollgates.
The second major cause of congestion is poor tollgate infrastructure.
My board will quickly formulate short, medium and long-term turnaround strategies with the view to launch a tollgate reconstruction plan jointly with our parent Ministry.
As you know that the construction of tollgates is the mandate of the Department of Roads (DoR), which resides within our parent Ministry.
It is my firm belief that if DoR and ourselves at Zinara deploy all our efforts to complement each other, we will quickly come up with a solution to cause the refurbishment of our tollgates in record time.
You will agree with me that in recent years, there has been a significant increase in vehicle population in the country and most of our tollgates, especially those outside the Plumtree to Mutare route, are no longer able to cope.
Working together with our parent ministry, our target is to upgrade our tollgates to toll plazas with more lanes as we approach them.
This should be complemented by modern and cutting-edge technology to ensure seamless mobility solutions at our tollgates.
We are also looking at expanding our horizons and benchmarking our operations with other road fund managers internationally so that we deliver top-notch service to our customers.
Further, there have been numerous complaints by customers on how they are being treated by some of our cashiers.
In this regard customer care training is imperative and it is something that we are going to prioritise.
We are thus urging our workforce manning tollgates, together with our stakeholders such as the law enforcement agencies to enhance their work ethic and servant leadership.
Sometimes the congestion is caused by lackadaisical conduct by those manning our tollgates and we shall be deploying technologies that checkmate such propensities.
There are also great initiatives that the team is working on to address tollgate congestion and we will see to it that by the second quarter of 2022, tollgate congestion is fully addressed.
We are also adopting an open-door policy where everyone is entitled to demand the best service from Zinara.
As I alluded to earlier on, we are here to serve the public and as the board of directors we are going to ensure that this filters down to everyone within Zinara.
A customer communication point or call centre that enables our motorists to communicate with Zinara will be established by end of the second quarter.
DM: The country’s road network, particularly in urban areas, has deteriorated over the years. How do you plan to ensure that funding from Zinara is used to improve the road infrastructure?
GM: I think this is a very pertinent question, considering the disbursements that we hand over to road authorities.
We resolved to publish disbursements every quarter to ensure that no one blames Zinara by saying that they have not received funding.
So, we also appeal to the public to take the road authorities to task in explaining how they are utilising the funds that we are disbursing.
This can have a significant impact on fast-tracking road rehabilitation.
However, the deterioration of our road infrastructure, especially in urban areas like you rightly pointed out, has also attracted the attention of the Government through our parent Ministry.
If you have been following events of the past few weeks, our Transport Minister, Felix Mhona, indicated that Government was now taking over some roads from road authorities in order to refurbish the road network in terms of Statutory Instrument 47 of 2021.
The Minister is empowered by the law to do so and because of that, we are going to see accelerated development of our road infrastructure across the country.
I support that stance because I believe that the people of Zimbabwe need development hence the need to expedite these issues so that no one is left behind.
DM: Local authorities have cited insufficient funding for road maintenance as well as delays in disbursement of funds from Zinara. What is your response to these charges?
GM: Yes, while we acknowledge that the funds we disburse are inadequate to completely refurbish our road network because our road infrastructure was neglected for a very long time, we have noted that some road authorities are not being honest with the citizens and do not want to account for the funds that we disburse to them.
I can safely confirm that Zinara has no reason whatsoever to withhold funding from the road authorities.
Just to let you know that for this year, by the first week of January, we had already advised all the road authorities on their allocations for the year.
I hope they have started prioritising and planning because the longer we delay, the more we are disadvantaging our citizens.
However, if a road authority fails to acquit its previous disbursement, we cannot afford to release the next disbursement hence allegations of late payments arise.
As the chairperson, I would like to assure you that, we are alive to the urgency of road rehabilitation and I assure you that once a road authority acquits, we immediately release the next disbursement.
Given the foregoing, we will ensure that we sustainably interact with such local authorities with a view to sharing experiences and facilitating the upgrading and improvement of road networks. We also urge the local authorities to bulletin how they would have used the money disbursed to them whether on a quarterly or annual basis.
For the year 2021, all councils across the country were fully paid in line with their requests. There is no single council that requested funds on time and failed to receive payments.
The interim certificates of payments that were submitted by road authorities late in December or early in the year are currently being honoured.
DM: There are reports of revenue leakages at tollgates across the country, what counter measures will you put in place to plug the leakages?
GM: To emphasise what l said earlier, we are going to ensure that all our systems are computerised in order to minimise human interface.
The project of e-tolling is something that we are seriously looking at to ensure that our operations are seamless and efficient.
From the end of the first quarter this year, the project of enhancing the computerisation of tollgates would have started and you will see the change for yourself.
DM: You have indicated that you intend to upgrade and modernise some tollgates. How many toll gates does Zinara seek to upgrade this year and how much has been set aside for the exercise?
GM: It is important to underline that tollgates are owned by the line Ministry and as ZINARA we are working with the Ministry to ensure that these tollgates are fully developed.
We will be jointly announcing the Tollgate Development Plan with the Ministry soon.
A solid budget is already available to ensure that this task is a success.
Zinara will ensure that modern systems are implemented at these tollgates.
DM: The parastatal has in the past been accused of corruption. How do you intend to enhance Zinara’s transparency and accountability?
GM: I alluded to the fact that my vision is to build a new Zinara.
We are going to put in place systems that are robust to tame the scourge of corruption. We have to continue changing our culture to ensure that we walk in line with the tenets of good corporate governance.
We have introduced a loss control department which has been mandated to work hand in glove, and honestly, with law enforcement agents.
My message to all Zinara staff is that we have been entrusted with handling public funds and there is a need to manage such with high levels of propriety and probity.
Accordingly, we commit to adhere to the various corporate governance, legislative and policy frameworks that guide us and as a board, we also have the mandate of adequate and efficient oversight. But let me say that though there are some bad apples, the negative perception that most people associate Zinara with has to do with legacy issues emanating from the findings of the Grant Thornton audit report that was published in 2016.
So some actors continuously regurgitate the report forgetting that it is also important to measure the progress made so far in correcting the gaps which were identified by the 2016 report, almost six years ago.
Forty-three issues were raised in the audit and Zinara can proudly say all the issues have been addressed and these will be publicised soon after the relevant Parliamentary processes are concluded.
