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We have known major local road construction tenders to be awarded to foreign companies, local ones being sub-contracted for smaller tasks here and there.

Machinery and technical experts were shipped in for jobs that often were granted national project status.

It was clear we had no confidence in local capacity to undertake large infrastructural projects yet Zimbabwean engineers are building many roads, bridges and airports in Africa.

After being awarded to a consortium of 14 local companies around 2003, the project to dualise the country’s busiest road, the Beitbridge-Masvingo-Harare-Chirundu highway, was snatched away from them for alleged non-performance yet the real reason why there was no progress was that some in senior positions in the country sought bribes from the firms.

A foreign company was, needless to say, later roped in but it soon emerged that the reason why that company was awarded the US$1,9 billion tender was just because it was foreign. Geiger International from Austria, the winner of the tender, had no proof of funding and had not built even 50km of road in the whole of Africa. Because they had nothing in the bank and no relevant record, they could not perform a miracle of dualising that road.

The First Republic still tolerated them but when the Second Republic came in it booted the company out and took a decision that has told us how wrong we were all along. In October last year, the Government handed the project to a consortium of five local contractors who have not only done a great job on the highway but are also doing it for US$650 million, representing a staggering US$1,3 billion saving.

President Mnangagwa toured the road yesterday to get an appreciation of the work that has been done over the past nine months. Tensor Systems, Fossil Contracting, Masimba Construction, Exodus and Company and Bitumen World impressed him.

“We decided to engage the expertise within our country, that our people, our companies, our own engineers,” he said yesterday.

“So, we said we shall construct, widen the road, dualise the road with our own domestic resources. The standard of work produced by our local companies, our own people meets the regional standards required in Sadc. We are grateful to our people. On my way here, I had the opportunity to appreciate the roadworks along various sections of the highway. The quality and standard work that is being done by our five contractors is indeed impressive. . . . And more importantly also, each company at each section employs the local people in that area. We have no engineers from outside Zimbabwe, all the engineers and technicians are local. This is what it should be.”

President Mnangagwa commended the department of roads for complementing works by contractors through works on the Beatrice and Chivhu sections of the highway which had become high accident zones.

“The speedy completion of the road sections we are commissioning today, bear testimony of our ability as Zimbabweans to champion our own development with unity, focus and common purpose,” said President Mnangagwa.

“It is further pleasing that skilled locals, in various fields such as engineering, architecture and surveying among others, constitute the bulk of those doing the work. This is how it should be, Zimbabweans building their motherland, brick upon brick, stone upon stone. This is what the heroes and heroines we will be remembering next week fought for. The onus is now on us to build from where they left.”

The five companies have done us proud. They have raised the national flag high. They have shown us all that Zimbabwe has the financial muscle, has the right skills to execute world-class infrastructural projects.

We have many more roads to dualise, rehabilitate and build from scratch. On the evidence of what has been done on the Beitbridge-Masvingo-Harare-Chirundu highway there is no need to look outside for contractors to undertake those projects. In picking locals to do those jobs, we localise value, we save much money, we promote local employment, we build local capacity, we create that valuable sense of ownership of that which makes our country.

Also, the five companies have done themselves a huge favour which will assist them in winning road construction contracts abroad in countries that still lack local capacity to undertake those jobs.

On the evidence of yesterday, we expect the project to be completed on schedule so that we have a more navigable, wider highway on which traffic moves faster and more efficiently not this aged, accident-prone strip we have for our busiest road.