THE name Hwange is usually associated with coal mining and it is home to the country’s largest game park. Hwange National Park is also home to the legendary elephant, leopard, rhinoceros, lion and buffalo popularly known as “Big Five” animals.
These are the most sought-after fauna within the travelling and touring industry.
The coal mining town is situated in Matabeleland North province, which is considered to be the country’s richest province in terms of natural resources.
However, the district at which Hwange is situated is slowly or gradually sliding into oblivion in terms of infrastructural development, which of late has been hogging the limelight for all the wrong reasons-pollution.
A lot has been written and reported concerning the status of the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls road, which also somehow happens to also pass through this particular coal mining town.
This particular highway is among several road death traps whose consequences to the travelling public is beginning to be a cause for concern even to Yours Truly, who in the past has written in several acres of space appealing for assistance on road rehabilitation.
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Yours Truly was “excited” to learn that government has finally made a commitment to establish a road that links Tsholotsho and Hwange National Park as part of tourism promotion as the proposed route will be shorter and more convenient.
While this is a positive development, more also needs to be done on the Bulawayo-Tsholotsho road as the road is in dire need of rehabilitation to make it more convenient to travelling public.
It would rather be futile to construct a new road access road to the national park without fixing the main highway as such problems would continue to proliferate hence denting the travelling and touring industry.
Now back to Hwange issues as intimated in early paragraphs of this column.
Air and water pollution are slowly becoming a proverbial thorn in the flesh to most Hwange residents and also reached alarming proportions that are similar to potholes menace whose panacea is as slippery as an eel.
Yours Truly will in this instalment discuss how air pollution has negatively affected those living in the so called posh areas popularly known as low density suburbs compared to “kuma western” as the street lingo diction dictates.
The tide has somehow turned in Hwange as thick dust air pollution is now most prevalent in some low density areas which in the past were unheard of as if it was some form of taboo-thanks to this other highway popularly known as old Bulawayo Road.
To the uninitiated, this particular road straddles two concession areas in Hwange, namely Colliery and National Railways of Zimbabwe.
This road is mainly used by haulage trucks traversing the length and breadth of the concession leaving thick polluted air in their wake whose dust stubbornly penetrate in most residential houses whose ripple effects is anyone’s guess in terms of cleanliness and durability.
Some residents are now ‘compelled’ to try all forms of ingenuity such as enclosing or covering shoes and other related clothing material in plastic packets to guard against depreciation among others.
Washing of dirty clothes is usually done on a daily basis while the same applies to kitchen utensils while engagement with polluting organisations seems to be ongoing with no end in sight.
Praying for sanity to prevail.Till we meet in the next column.
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