Toll Roads to Nowhere

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world people are testing flying passenger vehicles and self-driving cars for domestic use. Even a bullet train is old technology.

Drones have popped out of sci-fi books and films: In African countries like Rwanda, drones deliver life-saving necessities to remote areas which cannot be reached by road.

The irony is seemingly lost on our government of which the politicians and bureaucrats wax lyrical with buzz phrases like “fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)”, “blue economy”, and “green hydrogen”.

Yet in practice they throw scarce resources at old-fashioned road networks.

Why would a government tax its beleaguered citizens to death for infrastructure that would be obsolete in about a decade at the expense of sustainable development?

It can only be due to either ignorance or malfeasance.

For bureaucrats, it is difficult to look beyond malfeasance. Politicians may be forgiven for buying into the schemes of bureaucrats because of their shortsighted focus on winning votes in order to occupy public office.

But Cabinet members should at least try to think critically when approving schemes such as toll roads that the Road Fund Administration (RFA) talked them into approving.

We are not only referring to the grossly out-of-touch timing of an additional road-user tax at a time when fuel costs have shot up nearly 100% in two years.

Toll charges would be a massive waste of money on infrastructure that is no longer central to improving human development or lifting the masses out of poverty.

If it was for energy/electricity and spreading the internet superhighway to improve digital connectivity it would be a different (and progressive) conversation.

Money spent on more and bigger roads comes at the expense of vital necessities (for example, sanitation, food production and the internet) that would help lift many Namibians out of poverty and into a dignified life.

The policymakers seem spectacularly out of touch with not only present realities, but also future possibilities.

Not only are the wretched poor being failed, but the government is also bleeding the working class and middle classes dry to pander to an insatiable elite interested only in lining their pockets.

Landless People’s Movement (LPM) leader Henny Seibeb this week in parliament asked for “closing the revolving door” of insider trading.

Seibeb referred to people who resign from state employment only to benefit from government-funded projects they played a pivotal role in devising.

A survey of consultants and business owners doing roads and other public works will show that the key players either worked for the state in those areas or their close relatives and friends have ‘won’ government tenders.

Such is the malfeasance.

Without critically looking beyond what meets the eye, the huge road projects within Windhoek out to Okahandja and the international airport seem like impressive constructs of engineering.

But was it absolutely necessary to have such huge road projects replete with a multitude of bridges, overpasses, under-carriages and snaking off-ramps?

Could some of those billions of dollars not have been better used to modernise railway lines and take the pressure off the roads for mass goods and passenger transportation?

As it is, a vast majority of Namibians cannot even afford private motor vehicles to enjoy our nice-to-have roads.

Then again, a person like former president Hifikepunye Pohamba is only too happy that the Roads Authority named the B2 highway from Swakopmund to Walvis Bay after him.

Perhaps he neither cares nor realises that billions of dollars have been spent on vanity projects for the self-enrichment of a few, instead of “alleviating poverty”, as politicians say.

Those roads will take Namibia nowhere. If anything, they will only take their toll on the taxpayer.

Or will they continue to sink costs into self-serving white elephants?

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