The Vehicle Inspection Department’s depot in Eastlea, Harare, is set to be transformed into a state-of-the-art training management centre. This centre will accommodate the Central Vehicle Registry (CVR), the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe, and Road Motor Transportation.
Road and certificate of competency tests will shift from the VID depot in Eastlea. Light vehicles will be tested at the Belvedere depot, while buses and trucks will undergo testing at a newly designated site near the Kuwadzana roundabout.
On Thursday, March 28, Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister Felix Mhona personally led a delegation on an inspection tour of the VID depots in Eastlea and Belvedere, as well as the newly established site near the Kuwadzana roundabout. Speaking after the tour, Minister Mhona said, as quoted by The Herald:
I am happy that today we are here in the Kuwadzana area and others might be surprised by what is the ministry doing at this particular point in time.
But I want to thank His Excellency Cde Dr Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa our visionary leader.
As I always say, we have a good leader who then gives us the trajectory of what we should pursue in terms of infrastructural development projects.
We started at Eastlea depot where we did our tour then we moved to Belvedere and finally we are here.
We own this place as a ministry and we are talking of 33 hectares. It is virgin land where we are proposing to say we need to decongest.
You know we have got CVR right in the city centre, and we have got Eastlea VID again which is also congested in terms of operations.
The idea behind what we are doing as a Ministry is to think outside the box and see how we can buttress and also augment the financing modalities when it comes to the Treasury. We want to use our own resources within the Ministry.
We have the Traffic Safety Council, we have ZINARA, and we have CMED. So we should talk about civil works. We have got CMED in place and if you talk of funding, we have ZINARA.
If you talk of safety concerns, we have the Traffic Safety Council. So you will see us having one centre when it comes to transport solutions.
So we are going to be having a transport management centre housed at Eastlea VID. We are going to be relocating the tests that you have seen in terms of certificate of competency, in terms of the provisional tests, that were done in that particular depot.
Mhona also revealed that a new weighbridge will also be constructed at the new depot by the Kuwadzana roundabout.
He said the training centre at Belvedere could be upgraded with the private sector partnering with the Ministry.