The Vungu Rural District Council has procured a mobile clinic van from South Africa, and the local authority expects its delivery this week.
The mobile clinic vehicle was bought for ZW$22m using devolution funds from 2021, according to the local authority.
Vungu RDC Chief Executive Officer Alex Magura told 98.4FM News on Friday that the van was already in the country.
“This year we have been able to purchase a mobile clinic van. It has not yet been delivered, but it`s already in Harare and it`s undergoing the registration process. We expect it to be delivered to us anytime next week (this week),” Magura said.
He said the council was this year allocated a total of ZW$316m in devolution funds for the year 2022 and has to date only received ZW$43m.
Apart from the mobile clinic van, Magura said the local authority used ZW$11m from the $43m to construct a pipeline that supplies water to a clinic that it is constructing in Ward 1, Shangani North area.
“We have a piped water scheme in Ward 1 and the piped water scheme came about for the primary purpose of supplying the new clinic that is under construction with water. We are doing a clinic, Impala clinic, using devolution funds, and that piped water scheme was also done using devolution funds.”
He added:” The source of water is about 8 kilometres from the clinic so we realised that instead of having a pipe that runs through the villages without supplying the people along the pipe with water, we decided that let us have some water points along the way where the community can actually draw some water.”
Magura said the council was also making efforts to improve its road rehabilitation mandate by adding more vehicles to its fleet.
“Last year we were able to purchase a tipper truck and TLB frontend loader to capacitate our roads department. Those are two pieces of equipment that have gone a long way in improving the quality of work that we do, he said”
He said Vungu RDC this year received ZW$52m from ZINARA for Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme and had used some of it to repair a broken-down grader.
“The grader was down since March and it was only repaired to come back on the road about two weeks ago and what we intend to do in terms of its deployment is to deploy to finish off works on Chiwundura road. Chiwundura road is the only road we have been able to work on under the ERRP2 programme.”
“For this year we got an allocation of ZW$52m under the ERRP, so part of that allocation is what we used to pay for the repair of the grader. We were charged ZW$8m to have it repaired. It had issues with the pump mainly and we actually had to add internally generated resources to resuscitate the grader.”
He added that the balance of ZW$46m was used for the rehabilitation of Chiwundura road and the council only managed to grade about 8 kilometres.
Meanwhile, Vungu constituency Member of Parliament Omega Sibanda commended the rural district council for procuring the mobile clinic van.
“I commend it (Vungu RDC), using devolution funds, it bought a mobile clinic van which has two compartments and the vehicle is already in the country. This means the whole area of Vungu constituency and Chiwundura will be serviced by this clinic, especially places without clinics, places like Nima, Chisarasara, Shangani North.”