Editorial Comment: Enough is enough on the roads

ON Wednesday, authorities revealed the grim statistics that 25 people have been killed in road traffic accidents on our roads across the country in the past 10 days.

That’s a huge number for a small country like ours.

It’s even more painful when one notes that the accidents are being attributed to human error and violation of road traffic regulations.

It has been quite a bloody period on our roads in recent days.

This week, an accident claimed six lives after a commuter omnibus, which had no certificate of fitness, route authority and mandatory passenger insurance, collided with a haulage truck.

The accident occurred on Monday, at around 1pm, when the kombi was overtaking a Toyota Belta at a curve.

Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister, Felix Mhona, visited the accident site and revealed that in the past 10 days we have lost 25 lives in road accidents.

He said all this means that there is something wrong on our roads and he revealed that President Mnangagwa has been affected by this horrible loss of life on our highways.

Minister Mhona said authorities will, from now onwards, no longer take lightly what is happening on our roads and highways because it was clear that there were many things which were wrong.

Somehow, we have allowed some transport operators to conduct business when they don’t have basic things like proper certificates of fitness.

We have allowed some public transport drivers to take the law into their hands and behave as if they own the highways and our other roads.

We have allowed recklessness by the kombi drivers to be something that is acceptable and we don’t take them to task when their crazy driving antics threaten the lives of other road users and their passengers.

In fact, as strange as it sounds, we have created a situation where the worst of the kamikaze kombi drivers are hailed as the best of the lot and some passengers even portray them as heroes.

On the occasions when these drivers from hell have crashed their kombis, killing and maiming their passengers, we have not taken our investigations to the source of the trouble – the owners of these kombis.

These are the people who, because they are driven by greed and a pursuit for profits at all cost, have been encouraging their drivers to break all the road regulations and bring home the highest possible daily revenues on a daily basis.

Then, we have some bad apples in our police force and rather than enforce the law by grounding these vehicles, which cannot pass the test to be on the road, they turn a blind eye in return for a bribe.

Home Affairs Minister, Kazembe Kazembe, is right, the time has come for a different bit effective approach and it should start with looking at how our public transport sector is being policed.

We just can’t continue like this by turning our roads into highways of hell.