dyton mupawaenda
Manje So with Mai Juju
MAI JUJU will start by extending her deepest sympathies to the family of the man who fell off a moving kombi’s rear bumper in February and later died.
That was tragic.
But let me also say this: What possessed a grown man to think that clinging to the back of a speeding Toyota Hiace like a house gecko (chipotanemadziro) was a viable commuting strategy?
And what possessed the driver, Nyasha Muteweye, who will now be languishing in prison for two years, to drive his vehicle like a maniac when he knew there was a man hugging the back of his moving vehicle?
Argh, we seem to have now normalised the abnormal.
In any sane country, a “bus” that lets passengers ride on the bumper like they are auditioning for a circus act would be scrapped on sight.
But here in Zimbabwe, the kombi has been elevated from public transport to public hazard.
And we are quite frankly tired of pretending it is part of our modern future.
Let us be honest fellow Zimbos: Kombis are incompatible with modernity.
You cannot build a 21st-century nation on the backbone of a vehicle that stops anywhere anytime — in the middle of a highway, on a roundabout, inside a moving river of traffic — to either pick up a passenger or for no apparent reason.
The drivers have their own traffic rules: Red lights are suggestions, indicators are optional and the pedestrian is a mobile obstacle to be honked into submission.
Muteweye was speeding with a man hanging off the rear.
Well, that is not a public transport system — That is a death wish with wheels.
And the law? Please.
Kombi drivers have perfected the art of the “quick dash” — a folded US$5 note slipped to a traffic officer faster than you can blink.
Law enforcement is compromised not because our officers are inherently bad, but because kombi economics run on grease — both mechanical and financial. Ge ge ge.
A driver can break every rule in the book, pay his way out and be back to overloading his snail-shaped coffin before sunrise.
We are not regulating kombis; we are subsidising a bribery ecosystem.
Then there is the litter. Oh, the litter. Have you ever stood at a kombi rank in Harare?
The ground is a geological layer of banana peels and maize cob fossils.
Passengers eat, drivers toss and the city council collects apologies.
Kombis do not just move people; they move entropy.
They turn every bus stop into a landfill and every rank into a disaster zone.
Now, Mai Juju would like to take you back to a golden time.
A brief, glorious window when sanity prevailed.
During Covid-19, kombis were banned. And what happened? The roads became quiet and sane.
For those few months, we glimpsed what a civilised city could feel like.
And then we opened the gates, and the madness returned.
So, what is the solution?
Definitely not reform. Not “retraining”. We have tried that.
The solution is replacement.
We need a mass public transport system of modern passenger coaches — air-conditioned, with designated stops, electronic ticketing and drivers who are employees, not wannabe cowboys. They should accommodate seated (not sardined) travellers only.
The coaches should run on schedules, not superstition.
We need a system where the only thing hanging off the back is a bicycle rack, not a human being.
Imagine: You board at a proper terminal, tap a card, sit down and arrive without praying to every ancestor you have.
No speeding. No bribery. No litter tsunami. That is modernity. That is a Zimbabwe we can be proud of.
Until then, we will keep reading stories like Muteweye’s. A driver jailed. A passenger dead. And somewhere, another kombi is loading 20 people into a 15-seater, with two more on the bumper.
No, mhani!
We deserve better.
Let us just drive kombis into the museum — next to the typewriter and the encyclopaedia.
Their time is over.
Ndikoko!
Online Reporter