One really has to wonder about the Zimbabwe government’s airport highway project. First, there’s hardly anyone using the airport. Second, on my return to Zimbabwe last Thursday evening, there were no traffic lights working and there was very little street lighting. The current road does its job just fine. Pretty soon we’ll have a very big and expensive road and we’ll still have no street lighting or working traffic lights because Zimbabwe’s national power company can’t deliver.

Some fine minds at work in our government.

The non-working traffic lights on the night I returned were of course causing mayhem. Lounging in the dark at these intersections were details of two policemen and women clearly waiting for some political chef to make his or her way home from the airport. They stood idly by gazing at the traffic snarled up in front of their noses. But, imagine if they were caught directing traffic and Mugabe or Tsvangirai came motorcading through!

On arriving home I was greeted at the back door with someone waving a torch at me.

I was told that most days and nights there had been a powercut. Since Thursday I’ve had one day of power. The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) estimates our bills every month. Amounts are not based on actual useage. But do you think that they’ll take into account that as winter bites and they’re providing a third of the power they used to, that they will estimate their bills down. Ha. Fat chance. Instead our bills will remain the same, or in many cases, increase.

Bright sparks at work in ZESA? I don’t think so.

This entry was posted on May 16th, 2011 at 2:38 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Reflections, Shortages and Inflation, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.