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Christmas is supposed to be a happy time of the year, and the festive season is generally a time when most of us can wind down, relax with our families and recharge our batteries for the next year. Even in farming communities, it is that breathing space between getting the crop in and then weeding and harvesting, with the first fruits providing a good taste of what is to come.
And for many that is the case.
But for 47 people in the first week of the festive season, it was simply death on the roads and for their families there is no joy in carrying a coffin to its grave.
There is always a surge in road deaths at year end. This is totally unnecessary and cannot, and must not, be considered inevitable or impossible to change.
Almost all road accidents, and those at the end of the year, are caused by someone committing a criminal offence.
In almost all cases, a driver was drunk, a driver did not give way, a driver overtook where this was prohibited, a driver was speeding, a driver was not properly on the road, a driver changed lane in an unsafe fashion, a driver was driving without proper lights. Always the driver.
Even when there is some external factor, such a tyre blow-out or a brake failure, the fact that a driver was travelling at an unsafe speed, or was drunk and so could not control his vehicle when the emergency arose, or was committing some other offence, turns a very annoying accident into a fatality.
The death toll is so far sharply down from last year. Those police manning regular and impromptu road-blocks are helping a lot and we hope they will keep up the pressure. Given more resources the police could do more.
It is odd that a perfectly law-abiding person, the sort who would willingly help arrest a thief or any other criminal, will not abide by road rules.
The police are hampered, especially at this time of the year, at having no real way of measuring blood-alcohol levels. You basically have to be clutching an open beer bottle as you drive through a road block to be caught for this sort of offence.
Yet if cheap breathalysers were readily available, a lot of lives could be saved.
The cost, if the Treasury is panic-stricken over the cost of saving lives, could easily be recouped by serious fines handed out to those who flunk breathalyser tests. Results from other countries’ blitzes on drinking and driving show that huge cuts can be made in accident rates by this simple measure.
A real gain would be made if all drivers recognised that road laws and rules are not arbitrary. They are the result of 120 years of experience around the world on how to make driving safe and allow drivers the freedom the car gives without the deaths that can go with it.
Speed limits are set in Zimbabwe on several criteria: the engineering of the road, the traffic densities normally experienced and the actual number of accidents along a particular stretch over the last few years.
Limits are there to maximise traffic flow and minimise accidents.
Statistics showing how drinking alcohol, or using a cell phone while driving, reduce driving skills and increase accident rates are now so good that to ignore them is stupid.
Those who make the rules also drive and they are not killjoys, but people also trying to get home safely.
Yet we still get people — who are normally proud of the fact that they are law-abiding and who would be horrified to be called criminals — boasting how they commit serious crimes. “I was really wasted when I went home last night”, “I got this beauty up to 180km/h on Sunday”, “I managed to pass a whole lot of slow-coaches by driving down the middle of the road, getting the guys opposite to pull over”.
We have all heard this sort of thing.
If we all obeyed the laws to the letter and in spirit we would see a huge drop in road deaths. Even if 99 percent of us did so, the police would almost certainly be able to then remove the other one percent from the roads, and the courts could keep them off.
One Christmas let us try it. In fact, why not this Christmas.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter