According to a radio report, the municipality of Kabul has finalized the construction of more than a dozen of roads in different parts of Kabul. All these roads are very important and work to facilitate large number of commuters and their vehicles. At present, these roads are unpaved and create lot of problem for the people with traffic jams, dust and pollution and continuous irritation for the people living in the vicinity. The residents of the area and the commuters had this demand from many years and at last, the projects have been given the final shape.

However, the construction of roads in different parts of the country and especially in the capital city of Kabul has been very notorious. In less than ten years, large numbers of roads have been paved and constructed by spending large amounts of public money. The costs for the construction and paving of these roads were so high that they beat in price the most expensive roads ever paved in the metropolitan cities of America and Europe like New York, London, Paris and so forth. But the quality of construction and material used was so low that in a couple of years and in some cases even less than this, most of the roads started breaking down and now we see that these roads offer a terrible view and create so much difficulties for the general public. Just like so many other departments and fields of our country, the allotment of these projects was also not transparent and extreme corruption resulted in the poor quality of these roads. The corruption started from the organs of government, most importantly the city municipality headed by its chief municipal officer when the projects were allotted to those companies that were already blacklisted and had not shown satisfactory performance in past. Then, the contractors used the least quality material and constructed the roads in a way that they started decomposing in a year or two so that they should be able to get a fresh contract for paving the same roads again. But unfortunately, there was no counter-follow up of this corruption and no investigation was undertaken that should have brought the culprits into justice.

However, this time, a proper mechanism should be adopted so that the contracts should be allotted transparently and all the legal requirements should be strictly followed. For this purpose, not only the responsible members of the city municipality but also a number of other organs of government should be invited in the process so that the whole process should be transparent and we should be able to give long-lasting and high quality roads to our citizens.