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Mhlupheki Dube
ONE of the perennial problems along our national highways is the number of stray animals along the roads that contribute to traffic accidents.
These accidents result in loss of property in terms of the damaged vehicles and the animals.
In some cases human life is lost due to these animals. My farmer blood makes me instinctively empathise with the farmer for his loss especially when I find five big dead animals and the vehicle is not even at the scene suggesting perhaps that it was a haulage truck that drove away.
Those five animals are something worth around US$5 000 and I’m thinking some careless driver has just run over someone’s livelihood when all he could have done was to be more careful on the road and apply all the defensive driving principles he was taught.
However, what I have observed along the Plumtree-Bulawayo-Harare Road is changing my view in terms of the culpability of these farmers with regards to traffic accidents along the highway.
Despite the erection of a fence cordoning off the road to prevent animals straying onto the road, one still finds droves of animals grazing along the road and inevitably straying onto the road, causing accidents in the process. Farmers along these highways seem to be unable to do something as small as closing the gate so as to prevent animals going onto the road.
In some instances they are even unable to repair a broken fence, obviously preferring who ever erected the fence to come and repair it as well. It is unavoidable that the fence will get one or two of its strands broken because a tyre burst on the road can force the car to veer off and damage the fence in the process, but why not fix that broken area to protect your investment and avoid accidents that may claim human lives?
Now it is very common especially along the Plumtree-Bulawayo section of the highway particularly within the 25km zone from Plumtree, to find stray animals on the road and naturally a day will not pass without one or two animals being knocked down.
In all these cases it is the animal that belongs to a smallholder livestock farmer which is knocked down by highway traffic. You will hardly find any cattle belonging to a commercial farmer that has been run over by traffic. This is in itself telling in terms of the difference in mindsets of the two types of farmers.
The other is just a reckless person who with very little regard to the welfare of the animals. A commercial livestock farmer even owning a small herd takes utmost care of his/her herd because he/she deliberately made a decision to invest in that sector and will therefore not let his/her animals stray onto the national highways risking being run over by vehicles.
My call is therefore to the local authorities with which these fenced highways fall and the relevant Government departments tasked with managing national highways to find mechanisms of making sure community members who are being served by the fence along the highway are called in to partake in the maintenance of that fence and that they ensure their livestock are kept on the other side of the fence.
These community members cannot just be passive spectators who have no contribution to make, especially in maintenance of this investment as this will make them not to appreciate the value of the fence.
They must bring their skin into this by at least ensuring that the fence works in the manner that it is supposed to or else the whole point of investing in kilometres of boundary fence along the highway will be lost if community members whose villages are along these highways are left to just watch broken strands of barbed wire lying on the ground without taking action. In fact the next thing that will happen is the theft of that fence with the whole village claiming ignorance on who stole the fence, yet they somehow have fenced homesteads and fields but no toilets!
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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