A government auditor just caught Zimbabwe's bus company treating a twelve-kilometer hop across town the same as a marathon run to Victoria Falls, revenue-wise, and the math never had a chance. The Auditor-General's report on ZUPCO found buses on the short Kuwadzana route carried identical monthly targets to ones running thirteen times the distance to Victoria Falls, Muzarabani, and Domboshava.
Belvedere depot buses got slapped with a flat ZWL$18,000 target back in August 2022, roughly US$36 at the exchange rate then, and that number apparently sat frozen from January 2022 onward even while the currency cratered from 111 to nearly 500 against the dollar over those same months.
Performance-wise the whole system's been shaky. Average target attainment sat around 76 percent overall, dipped to just 54 percent between January and late October 2024, and some depots didn't even bother setting targets certain months, Belvedere skipped June 2024 entirely, Willowvale missed two months in 2024, Khami missed twice too.
Then there's the flip side, wild overshoots that expose how broken the targets actually were. Belvedere blew past its August 2022 number by 1,356 percent, Masvingo hit 1,133 percent in February 2024, with average overachievement across sampled depots landing around 500 percent. ZUPCO's own response blamed government-mandated fare cuts, lost loading bays post-lockdown, and clients paying late for bus hires.
Belvedere depot buses got slapped with a flat ZWL$18,000 target back in August 2022, roughly US$36 at the exchange rate then, and that number apparently sat frozen from January 2022 onward even while the currency cratered from 111 to nearly 500 against the dollar over those same months.
Performance-wise the whole system's been shaky. Average target attainment sat around 76 percent overall, dipped to just 54 percent between January and late October 2024, and some depots didn't even bother setting targets certain months, Belvedere skipped June 2024 entirely, Willowvale missed two months in 2024, Khami missed twice too.
Then there's the flip side, wild overshoots that expose how broken the targets actually were. Belvedere blew past its August 2022 number by 1,356 percent, Masvingo hit 1,133 percent in February 2024, with average overachievement across sampled depots landing around 500 percent. ZUPCO's own response blamed government-mandated fare cuts, lost loading bays post-lockdown, and clients paying late for bus hires.
