Move the capital!

In my previous post, I suggested that it might be time to allow Harare suburbs to incorporate as satellite localities in the same way that Norton, Chitungwiza and Ruwa are.Today, I want to go as far as to say that the nation's capital must be moved out of Harare to some place else, probably in the central Midlands. I am no urban planner but I suspect that many of my readers will realize that the City of Harare has grown beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. Apart from being poorly managed partly because of its sheer size (but mainly due to the interfering hand of a corrupting, national political establishment), the city is basically falling apart at its very seams.Harare is crowded like a bee-hive, except that this is not an appropriate analogy, because bees do indeed, seem to thrive in their habitat. Harare, on the other hand, seems to suffocate everything and everyone, allowing only the most well connected to thrive. For example, although the current shortage of water is primarily due to mismanagement by the city council and the national water authority, the deeper truth is that in the long term, the city will be short of water for the simple fact that the sources of water will not be able to provide enough for the burgeoning population.Any future government which takes over after the prevailing fiasco must commission a study to honestly examine the viability of Harare remaining simultaneously the nation's political and commercial capital. I suspect such a study will show that the people of Zimbabwe would benefit from a major national project which would showcase genuinely Zimbabwean architectural, urban planning and engineering prowess. Such a massive project would take at least two decades to complete and would focus the nation's energy in a positive direction as the country recovers from the nightmarish malaise of the past three decades.