Has anyone ever noticed rampant road maintenances during the rainy season or is it just me? I am beginning to suspect a conspiracy to destabilise motorists or milk them, but this has gone for too long and it time we talked about it. At the onset of every season, overzealous community members begin digging up roads, mostly the dirty roads, flattening surfaces and pretending to make gallows for water to pass through.
No sooner than this is done, more rains fall putting the supposed road work into slippery mud that trap cars or cause them to veer their way through it. Meanwhile, the self-made saviours that fixed the roads disappear, leaving motorists to their own devices, incurring unnecessary costs in the process as car get damaged being pulled out of the mud. I was in a township in Blantyre and one turn off a tarred road was met with heaps of soil on two adjacent roads.
A loner was busy pushing a wheelbarrow and he threw a smile in my direction as if to demand one back for the ‘noble’ work he was doing. He believed he was doing the community a favour to be the one fixing the roads. I wasn’t amused.
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Most parts of the country have experienced the rains already and I inquired what he was doing messing up the roads in the rains and what prompted such damage in the name of doing us a favour. Obviously, those roads will be impassable once they are watered and meanwhile, he will be in the confines of his home as cars veer off roads into ditches or getting stuck in his mess. That heap of soil was enough to cause an avalanche to a village and there he was, convinced that as long as the sun shone, he was on the right track.
He never bothered to think outies the box. This is exactly what I am talking about. These works are absent in the October heat and everybody wakes from their slumber to do roads with the mud.
Perhaps it is the softening of the ground that push people to fix the roads or the notion that fixing roads while the soil is wet toughens the project. Nonetheless, the damage is evident and I implore on everyone who thinks this way to stop. We get rains at the same time of each year and if we haven’t learnt about when to fix our roads, then we will never learn.
At least brick moulders know better than to begin their projects at ungodly, rainy months. We can learn from them by avoiding to awaken muddy roads that are already the order of the day when it rains. The rule is simple: don’t’ dig those roads or import soil from construction sites to the roads during the rains!
Construction happens every time and why not fix the roads in drier seasons? The next tie anyone places a plate for alms as payments for fixing a road, which has become a favourite pastime for many lately, motorists should have the right to retaliate.
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