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A major effort has been launched this festive season to keep the roads and the general population safer with a major thrust, missing in previous years, of stressing prevention rather than enforcement, although law breakers will be dealt with if they ignore the advice and decide the rules are for “other people”.
But the statistics are there. We perhaps need to remember that those statistics, 500 plus people killed in the festive season, are not just numbers. They are families standing around an open grave lowering a coffin, they are people weeping, lives disrupted, children orphaned. We do not need that, again.
This week Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Felix Mhona, Commissioner-General of Police Godwin Matanga and chairperson of the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe Kura Sibanda have been making appeals to all drivers to follow the rules and not kill and hurt other people or kill and hurt themselves.
The Minister and Mr Sibanda gave the grim statistics. On average five people die on our roads every day of the year, but that average is heavily weighted by the appalling death and injury tolls over the festive season, around a quarter of the toll for the entire year. In the 2019 festive season we saw 11 955 accidents with 411 deaths and 1 708 non-fatal injuries.
Last year while the festive season accidents were almost stable on 11 513, the accidents were worse since 536 people died and 2 140 were injured. And last year were had a Level 2 lockdown with a curfew in December and a Level 4 lockdown with bans on intercity travel and a tighter curfew in January. Yet the reduction in accidents was trivial and it seems that people were smashing into each other at higher speeds.
Comm-Gen Matanga was also keen on people obeying the law, but has promised to keep a high level of patrols and checkpoints so that people know they are being watched, and is determined not just to enforce the traffic rules but also the Covid-19 lockdown rules, which include the 9pm curfew.
And he passed the warning that the Zimbabwean habit of slipping a cop a few dollars to make them change their mind and close their eyes is no longer an option. The cop and the bribe-payer will both be charged, and that stress on going for both sides of a corrupt transaction should help a lot. People offering a bribe need to realise that they are committing a crime and trying to induce someone else to commit one, and flashing some cash at a cop might now result in the driver wearing handcuffs and facing a far more serious charge than jumping a red light or going 10km/h over the limit.
The top cop will also do his best to protect us all against other crime, and his CID units have been sterling work in recent weeks in bringing armed robbers to justice, with a fairly large group spending Christmas in the remand cells. But again he would rather people were not travelling with bundles of cash, did not keep vast sums at home, and locked up their property.
The safety council are leading an effort this year to educate drivers and warn drivers with safety council staff on the roads. This is worth trying. For a start a lot of dangerous driving might not be obviously breaking a law.
Someone driving at the speed limit in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm might well be negligent, but it will take a lot of court time to prove this. But they can still be stopped and told they are taking a major chance and are not being safe.
At the same time there is no law in the traffic rules that forbids you to drive across a flooded bridge, but it is a really stupid thing to attempt. And there are a whole lot of other things that while technically not illegal are still risky and drivers who do them are far more likely to end up in the traffic statistics as dead or injured.
Traffic safety council officers have no enforcement powers, but they do know what they are talking about and following their advice is sensible.
It is a pity that the defensive driver course offered by the traffic safely council are not made universal, since they do slash accident rates, but the people who give these courses are out there right now ready to tell you how you can live to Christmas next year.
The causes of accidents are so well-known: drinking under the influence of alcohol, speeding, failing to give way, road rage, impatience and defective vehicles, although defective vehicles are about the least dangerous since most vehicle part failures result in someone parked at the side of the road.
But the rest are the killers. Some are not crimes. You can drive in a filthy mood, hating everyone else on the road. But all lead to deaths. Most drivers need to understand that braking laws and driving dangerously does not really achieve much. Simple calculations show that if two cars leave Harare for Bulawayo simultaneously with one driver being careful, going with the flow and obeying all road rules in spirit as well as the letter, and the other pushing everything to the limit, then the careful driver will arrive less than 30 minutes behind the pusher, and be in far better shape to do something useful on arrival.
And of course the careful driver is far less likely to be contributing to the statistics.
Online Reporter