The Sunday Mail
Engineer Michael Madanha
As you are aware, Zinara (Zimbabwe National Road Administration) plays a very important role in as far as road construction is concerned.
Actually, Zinara is the road fund of the country; so, what we are going to do as a new board is to restore the core functions of the organisation.
Zinara, as a body corporate, was created through an Act of Parliament — the Roads Act (Chapter 13:18).
We have a well-defined mandate to execute as a road fund.
We collect road-user fees in the area of tolling, vehicle licensing, overload fees, abnormal load fees and other levies.
After collecting these levies, we are supposed to disburse them to the four entities that work on road construction in the country — the District Development Fund (DDF), rural local authorities, urban authorities and the Department of Roads.
Now, we have a mandate to actually audit those funds.
The issue here is that the funds must be used for functions they are disbursed for — these are road funds and they must be used for that specific role.
This will help us to carry out our monitoring and evaluation, to help us ascertain that the quality of work being done is of good specification and up to the required standards.
As Zinara, you know we have some problems, but I think the origin of these problems has been the lack of adhering to the core functions of the organisation.
In other words, Zinara is not supposed to issue tenders for road construction; Zinara is not supposed to go and supervise construction work — we are supposed to monitor and evaluate to ascertain that quality management is done properly.
I think that’s where our problem starts from: non-adherence to the core functions of Zinara.
In the past, Zinara could issue contracts, and now when you go through the contracts, you find that the tendering procedures were not followed and this now becomes an audit finding.
Despite the fact that some of those works were already executed, I will not comment on the quality of the works, but we are not supposed to do such things as Zinara.
For Zinara to function properly, we are supposed to actually re-look at our implementing systems — are they up to date? Do they prevent leakages?
You find that we have a problem where sometimes workers can take advantage of weak systems and then they tamper with them to their advantage.
That is corruption at highest level and we are going to take it head-on.
President Mnangagwa has already declared zero tolerance to corruption.
That is what we are going to stick to and we have no sacred cows.
If you are found on the wrong side of the law, then you have to be answerable because already that goes against the corporate governance code, which every worker signs when they get employed.
Those are the rules of the game which must be adhered to. If it was a football match, then the referee is supposed to pull out a yellow card or a red card, and that’s exactly what we are going to do.
We are going to adhere to the corporate governance code and ensure all workers adhere to that, and that is besides improving on our systems.
We also intend to do some training for our workers. You find that when bad things are happening in an organisation, it’s a clear indication that there is lack of corporate culture, so we want to restore the corporate culture at Zinara.
I wouldn’t base myself on all allegations that are coming up in the Press, but where there is smoke there is fire.
What we are going to do is to ascertain the veracity of those allegations, to establish whether there is sufficient evidence and, beyond reasonable doubt, when all is done, we are going to take action and we will involve those with powers to investigate and make arrests.
We are not going to leave any stone unturned because this is a task we were given by His Excellency, the President, and we are not going to let him down.
Sanity will definitely prevail at Zinara.
Tollgate leakages
We are going to analyse all the problems we have and out of those problems, we are going to bring solutions which I think will work in our favour.
We are going to analyse all areas that collect road-user fees, we are going to detect all leakages and I believe once we close those leakages, they will translate into more revenue collection.
For example, we have some leakages in the area of tolling, whereby we recently discovered that some of our cashiers — not everyone, but some bad apples in the organisation — were using number plates of exempted vehicles to open boom gates at tollgates, while they illegally pocketed the payments.
We discovered that it was a serious leakage and we closed that.
In most instances, it is very difficult to verify how many cars have passed through a tollgate. The solution there is to provide a separate system; in this instance, I refer specifically to the vehicle-counting system which we can place near the tollgate.
With this system in place, our auditors will be able to verify the number of cars which passed through (the tollgate) and classify them.
It, therefore, makes it easy to estimate how much is expected from a tollgate.
Once we are armed with that information, we can be able to compare with the information we are getting from the tollgates.
Vehicle licensing scams
We also have problems in the area of vehicle licensing, where we have some (unscrupulous) agents who operate around Zinara buildings.
These agents, with the connivance of one or two people in the system, claim that they can assist individuals who would have accumulated penalties through non-payment of their vehicle licences.
In some instances, the information in the system is altered in such a way that those cars end up paying discounted licence fees and penalties.
But I want to appreciate the work being done by Zinara regardless of some bad apples within the organisation.
So, I think when we close some of the loopholes I alluded to, when we ensure that all our traffic fees are paid in full, when we ensure that all overloaded vehicles pass through weigh bridges and are charged, then we are also sure that it will translate to an increase in revenue collection.
We would not like to rush to increase tollgate fees.
First, we want to put our house in order, and when we are sure that the money for our road construction is not sufficient, then we will bring other measures to increase our revenue collection.
But definitely, our revenue will increase by first taking care of every loophole.
Maybe one thing we might consider as a board is to see how viable it might be to rope in private managers.
This is, however, still subject to debate by the board and relevant authorities.
We will try to outsource private management to manage our tollgates and we will debate on that.
Our tollgates have not been properly managed, and some individuals have been benefiting by taking money from the organisation.
You will find that we have two systems of tollgates, including the Infralink tollgates that are on the Plumtree-Harare-Mutare road.
This road was constructed through a partnership between Group Five (of South Africa) and Zinara.
That road is well managed and their tollgates do not have all these other problems being experienced in other areas.
I just believe that the tollgates are properly managed because the partner, Group Five, has to be paid back.
So there is nothing that will stop us from ensuring that the tollgates on our roads are properly managed and up to standard. There is nothing wrong with the system, but it can be tampered with.
But the board will work tirelessly to close any gap, which is subject to abuse, that might arise in the system.
And it is the duty of management to discover some of these loopholes before they spread like a veld fire.
The other problem we are going to address is of people who share their tollgate exemption cards.
We are definitely going to address that. For now, we take cognisance of the situation everybody is facing and it our hope that the tollgate fees will remain the same.
With the new board in place, I can tell you that Zinara is in good hands.
We are not going to leave any stone unturned in our quest to bring sanity to the country’s road administration organisation.
Engineer Michael Madanha is the new board chairperson for Zinara. He was speaking to The Sunday Mail reporter Norman Muchemwa on how he is going to transform the organisation.
