The day I learnt that the Zimbabwean government had started a VVIP housing project whereby it would import the walls of the guesthouses from Switzerland, Abu Dabi or some such place, I sat up straight and started noticing.
The government, you will recall, hired a Swiss company, Mabetex Group, to build the 18 “state-of-the-art” villas in Mount Hampden, a shout away from the new parliament donated by Zanu PF’s all-weather buddies from Beijing.
It’s not even clear how Mabetex got the contract. We know it’s big, but how were the tenders and contracts awarded? Surely, we have so many capable engineering and construction companies here and in the region who could have done a good job ahead of the Swiss.
The villas would house very, very important people coming for the Sadc summit in Harare in August.
I said to myself: Woooow, this is a cool project, importing walls from beyond the seas! Then I would smile so long on the possibility of importing whole villas and jet-dropping them on the Mt Hampden prairies. Not even drifting on summer clouds, high on crack, would beat that.
You haven’t heard all of it. Mabetex, the Swiss construction company, would fly in a whole 500 workers from Geneva to set up the precast villas. That’s right. Five hundred chocolate-sucking Swiss nationals to come and build 18 villas using pre-cast walls and all the other imported materials.
Then there would be an extra 300 Zimbabwean nationals to deal the mortar and what not while their Swiss counterparts put the nails in the roofs. A sum of 800 people working on 18 pre-cast villas.
The Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) told us — lied, rather — in early June that the villas would be up and shining by mid-July at the latest, well in time for the Sadc summit. But, towards the end of August and with the summit already water in the drains, the diplomatic village is still way behind completion.
They are still putting the roofs on, some of the single-storey villas are being plastered and there is no sign that the lodges will be completed any time soon. The roads leading to the village are mud-ridden and unlit at night. The double-storey villas give a worse story, because they have always lagged behind, anyway.
Now that the government has embarrassingly missed its own target, questions are popping up. It must sure be a whopping experience to see the kind of contract between Mabetex and the government for the construction of the villas.
This deal was done in secrecy, of course, but we still need to follow the money. How much was Mabetex given to put the pre-cast charade at the foot of Mt Hampden? This is Zimbabwe. The figures will definitely shock the skin off your frame.
The moment you hear that people are importing villa walls and whole Swiss populations to build “durawall” sties in Zimbabwe, you start smelling the dust. Such things are normally done to nice things up, make them look grand and then blind your eyes as they load tonnes of money away.
And you know perfectly well that, in Zimbabwe, tenders and contracts are always inflated. This is the country whereby, as you heard not too long ago, it costs more than US$2 million to set up a simple pedestrian gate at State House. Tenderpreneurship.
We don’t even know which ministry or department the villa project falls under. Is it Local Government? Is it Foreign Affairs? Or is it our super ministry, the OPC, or maybe Tourism or Parliamentary Affairs? Whichever it is, things are not looking good.
But then, it remains a deep mystery why the villas, being built in partnership with the much-respected Bitumen World that did the foundations, could not be completed. Surely, with such a huge crowd of people working on the project using pre-made materials, it shouldn’t have taken too long to do the guesthouses.
Or did government run out of money or someone stole the cement? If the coffers dried up, what does that say about government’s planning ability? It could also be that, in the haste to make some bit of money out of the project, the tenderpreneurs were not worried about anything else. They just wanted their 10% from the contract.
Now that the villas were not completed in time for the summit, what’s the way forward? They call it the Diplomatic Village, which means that, post-Sadc, it would be used to house dignitaries. But there doesn’t seem to be a clear plan on what will happen with the VVIP guesthouses.
There is a real and present danger that the project will be abandoned, now that there is no more Sadc madness. Ghost projects of that nature are not uncommon. For instance, ahead of South Africa hosting the Fifa World Cup in 2010, there was so much project hype even here in Zimbabwe but many such efforts are now abandoned because they were never completed.
That comes with the high possibility of the manipulation of the village infrastructure. If the villas are abandoned, some naughty chap will emerge from somewhere. He will take advantage of the lack of attention on the project and convert the villas to his own use.
We have seen lots of things of that sort happening in the past, whether it’s in council, central government or some such agency. Some of the people who did that have actually served jail time. So, if that happens, you are not going to worry only about Zimbabwean money having gone down the manhole, all the way to Bern or Geneva. You will also have to worry about hungry dudes swooping on that project to eat voraciously.
Watch this space. There are many schemers lurking out there, plotting on how they will raid the villas and make good money out of them.
*Tawanda Majoni writes in his personal capacity and can be contacted on majonitt@gmail.com