Last week I travelled on the Dordabis/Leonaldville road to Aminuis and this reminded me of my trips through this route over the years. Beautiful landscapes, good quality cattle of all kinds, especially within the commercial areas of farming, mixed in with sporadic tourist attraction sites modeled on old traditional German style habitations.

This road culminates into a small strip of tarred road of less than three kilometers as you approach the town of Leonaldville. Further on towards Aminuis it changes into a regular dirt road, immediately when you leave Kerkstraat. The road meanders through the arid semi-desert with light green vegetation, at times stabilizing into a two-strip sand-dune strip and then transforming itself into a gravel/dirt road on which an experienced driver can stabilize to a speed of eighty kilometers per hour, only to plunge through a pool of rain water over a stretch of ten and twenty meters, without any suspicion.
One hundred percent of our rural roads are dirt to gravel roads. While some leave the impression of relatively well maintained dirt roads, some are badly maintained, dangerous and life-threatening. Witness the road between Wilhelmstal and Omaruru which I saw during the second week in January 2012. It normally held the tradition of a well-maintained road in the country, along with the gravel road between Gibeon and Gochas and the one between Keetmanshoop and Aroab. In all my travels these were among the best maintained gravel roads in the country. Now, the Wilhelmstal-Omaruru road has turned into a shadow of its original self. And I shall not dwell on the Otjinene- Gam/Eiseb road or the Epukiro-Otjinene road.
What makes our roads so tenuous in their maintenance? Better still, why should Namibia 22 years into independence still entertain the presence of gravel and dirt roads at all? Most of the roads around the nation have remained gravel roads and their maintenance dependent on the mercy of those who are assigned to service them and during the rainy season the nation loses complete control.
My view is that the country needs to take the national road infrastructure seriously and extend the modern construction of roads much beyond the metropolitan areas, cities and towns. Currently, tarred roads extend mostly up to the regional centers/capitals and hardly reach the areas of economic growth in rural Namibia. So will the road infrastructure going to Kunene stop at Ohopoho and Khorixas. The tarred roads to Erongo will stop at Omaruru and Usakos. The tarred road to Omaheke will stop at Gobabis, granted that the connecting road between the Trans-Caprivi and Trans-Kalahari is now under construction, after long delays and budget virements for years.
It is time that we pay particular attention to the development of our rural roads; convert them into tarred roads, as a way of enhancing the spread of development in the country. For the absence of good roads inhibits the potential for rural economic investment.