A lot has been said many a time about the lack of or inadequate care and attention given to state properties and assets. That culture of non-maintenance of assets has over the years seen deterioration of state buildings, vehicles, our roads, bridges, railway lines, ports and harbours, tourism centres such as the forts and castles, our only motorway built in the 1960s and indeed many assets too tall to recall.
THE fact is that we spend so much money on state projects, beautiful by all standards, we outdoor them with pomp and pageantry and then forget about them. Regular maintenance and ensuring that they are kept in good shape becomes nobody’s business.
PERIODIC maintenance to ensure that those projects or assets do not deteriorate fast is not a culture that has been well rooted in us. And so our public institutions look on as their assets and liabilities are left to rot.
THE result is the continual damage(s) done to state properties. There are instances where drivers (both commercial and private) run into or knock down and damage traffic lights, and a lot of the times with people looking on. The offenders go scot free and the damages are left unattended, sometimes for months. It has almost become like a hit-and-run situation in our country where destruction of state facilities is done without any fear of the law.
IN our Weekend Today edition of Friday, February 03, 2016 we carried a front-page story of a worrying development where many police vehicles were rotting away at private fitting shops and public parking yards. According to our report, these police vehicles were being used as sleeping abodes by fitting apprentices.
SOME of these vehicles, our story indicated, had very minor faults that could have been fixed the same day those vehicles were sent there. The question then is: why would our state officials send faulty state vehicles to private fitting shops and not bother to have them fixed?
THE answer is obvious: that, it is government’s property and therefore should be the business of government. Pure and simple!
A cursory observation will reveal that not only police cars are being left to rot but also vehicles of many of the ministries, departments and agencies. To say the least, state vehicles are misused and dumped when they develop problems. It is nobody’s business to check them because they probably will have other vehicles in the pool to use.
THE misuse of state properties and dumping them is becoming too much, especially when the monies spent on acquiring them could equally have been used in building amenities that could have benefitted a lot of communities.
WE certainly cannot continue to watch on as state properties are left to rot by the few who use them and therefore are supposed to take care of them. We should begin to apply strict sanctions where they are due otherwise the culture of abandonment of public assets would continue to drain our scarce resources.
IT is against this backdrop that Today is calling on the various state agencies to put in place systems that will check periodic maintenance of assets in their care and responsible use of them as they hold them in trust for those who will come after them.
TODAY believes that if we also show a positive maintenance culture towards state assets, their life span will be prolonged which will in turn enable the country save money for other development projects.
IT is therefore about time that we changed our attitudes, especially in respect to the way we handle state assets. And that should start now!
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