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By Aimen Eljali.
Tripoli, 29 September 2013:
For two years, drivers in Tripoli have been complaining about the state of the capital’s roads . . .[restrict]– potholes, broken surfaces, bumps and, in some cases, no metalled surface at all, just sand and a few stones.
But today, probably for the first time since the revolution, there was the unusual sight of workmen starting to repair a road just a stone’s throw from the General National Congress building. With the tarmacadam scraper at work and the road being prepared for resurfacing, the evidence that the authorities were at last getting to grips with one of Tripoli’s ace gripes might therefore have been expected to have been well received.
Not a bit of it. On the contrary, drivers took angry exception to the fact that their use of the road was being stopped.
The Libya Herald watched as one furious young driver got out of his car, cast aside the plastic cones blocking the road, then drove up to the machine scraping the road surface and then started hooting loudly at him to get out of the way. Other vehicles followed, blaring their horns, forcing the road workers to stop and allow cars to get past. These then moved to reblock the street with a large vehicle so that they could get on with their work. But another angry young driver drove up, blared his horn for a few minutes and then got out and threatened the driver of the vehicle, demanding he move. He did.
Meanwhile a teacher from a nearby school castigated the workmen, demanding why they had not told him about the resurfacing in advance.
“They should have done it at night like they do in every civilized country”, one driver, who had clearly never been to France or Britain or anywhere else in Europe, told the Libya Herald.
But despite the insults, threats and interruptions, the engineers from the Libyan company contracted to execute the project, continued their work and finally completed the surface scraping.
They said that tomorrow they would block the road with trucks so that they could do the resurfacing properly.
It will be recalled that, as reported by Libya Herald, the Libyan authorities had awarded 48 road building and repair projects to local companies all over the country back in July of this year. [/restrict]
