Mon, 14 Aug 2017 13:56:03 +0000
By Bennie Mundando
STATE House yesterday moved in to quell the traffic chaos that has characterized Lusaka’s Kabangwe area brought by a blockage on the stretch where AVIC international is carrying out road expansion works by negotiating with the contractor to open the other lane.
Special assistant to the president for project implementation and monitoring Andrew Chellah and offi-cials from both the Road Development Agency (RDA) and WCE consultancy had a torrid time nego-tiating with site engineer Vincent Jade to open the lane.
Mr. Jade insisted the heavy traffic congestion that characterised the area especially on Saturday had nothing to do with a blockade on the other side of the road but was as a result of three trucks which had a breakdown which slowed the flow of traffic.
He said the only decision that company would entertain was for heavy duty vehicles to use the detour while allowing the rest to use the closed lane in order not to disturb the works going on.
However, Mr. Chellah and his team insisted the congestion was mainly due to the blockade on the part of the road in question hence the need to open it.
Mr. Chellah said it did not make sense that a stretch of less than 10 kilometres should be taking drivers over three hours as that had a huge effect on the efficiency on the movement of people.
After minutes of negotiating, the two parties agreed that the stretch would be opened at 16:00 with RDA promising to monitor the situation up to around 22:00 so that if need be, the lane could be closed again in order not to jeopardise the construction works going on.
They also agreed that signage be put on either ends of the stretch to allow vehicles use alternative routes near Heroes Stadium to allow only those vehicles which were getting into town use the Great North road in order to distribute the traffic flow and reduce the pressure.
Speaking to the reporters after the negotiations, Mr. Chellah said he was not on site to interfere with the operations of AVIC international because it was a respectable company that had never disappoint-ed Government in all its contracts but to address the traffic congestion challenge faced by the travel-ling public.
““AVIC is a very renowned contractor. We don’t doubt its professionalism. It is just that for this partic-ular section, it did not plan against the impact that starting works in this fashion will have on the trav-elling public but after this, am sure these problems will be over. So far they are cooperating.
“As much as we are constructing new roads, we must also take care of the comfort of the travelling public. Some people have been spending two to three hours here and as Government, we felt we could call the stakeholders. I was here two weeks ago. We discussed some remedial actions that need-ed to be taken, but the situation got worse and this means nothing has been done. So, today (yesterday) at 16:00, we will try a new measure,” Mr. Chellah said.
