Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – 1 June 2025

Imagine arriving in Zimbabwe’s second-largest city — Bulawayo — only to be swallowed by pitch blackness at every intersection.

The traffic lights are dead. The roads are a maze of confusion. Brakes screech, horns blare, and drivers wave frantically in the dark, trying to guess whose turn it is. There are no flashing ambers, no green guidance — just chaos.

This is not a power outage. This is deliberate. ZESA’s power utility arm, ZETDC, has switched off the city’s traffic lights as part of its hardline enforcement of prepaid electricity policies, plunging the once-orderly roads of Bulawayo into a living nightmare. With no warning and no visible plan for emergency response, motorists now enter a city where every crossing could be fatal — not from speed, but from silence, confusion, and total blackout.

Motorists in Bulawayo are navigating danger with every intersection as the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) has switched off multiple traffic lights across the city — a direct consequence of the power utility enforcing its prepaid electricity metering policy.

Several major intersections have gone dark in recent days, with no functioning traffic control systems in place, exposing commuters, pedestrians, and schoolchildren to heightened road safety risks. Affected hotspots include:

• Nketa Drive and Luveve Road
• Birkenhead and Plumtree Road
• George Avenue and Gwanda Road
• Siyephambili and Nketa Drive

ZETDC, a subsidiary of ZESA Holdings, has implemented the disconnections as part of its transition from postpaid to prepaid electricity systems, holding the Bulawayo City Council responsible for failing to load tokens on newly installed meters.

“The City of Bulawayo was made aware of the exercise in 2024 of converting traffic lights and street lights from conventional meters to prepaid metering,” said the city’s Corporate Communications Manager, Mrs Nesisa Mpofu. “However, the City does not have a programme of works or schedule of the areas where ZETDC is working on, to speedily attend to the registration and facilitate the electricity tokens.”

She added that each traffic light intersection requires approximately ZiG3 000 worth of electricity per month, a cost that now must be prepaid upfront by the municipality.

This development mirrors last year’s controversy when ZETDC switched off Bulawayo’s tower lights under similar circumstances. Then too, residents expressed outrage, claiming lives and property were being placed at risk due to poor coordination and sudden cut-offs. At the time, council officials complained of being blindsided, while ZETDC insisted that advance communication had been issued.

Now, as traffic lights fall victim to the same bureaucratic standoff, city drivers are left to interpret intersections without guidance — relying on guesswork and goodwill in a system built for order, not improvisation.

While ZETDC launched the national prepaid metering rollout in 2012 for domestic and commercial customers, the inclusion of critical infrastructure like traffic control systems has raised new alarms over governance, prioritization, and public safety.

Despite the dangerous implications, no emergency measures or manual traffic marshals have been deployed at the affected intersections, leaving residents to question whether public safety is being held ransom over a billing dispute.

As of this morning, no firm timeline has been given for the reactivation of the lights. The City of Bulawayo says it is waiting for ZETDC to submit invoices to enable the purchase of tokens and restoration of power.

Meanwhile, the city’s roads remain a perilous gamble — with every robot down, another accident inches closer.