Open Letter to ZRP traffic boss

Gerald Maguranyanga Traffic Friday
Hardly hours after your promotion and subsequent appointment to the important position of Officer Commanding National Traffic, this column, Traffic Friday, from its unfailing sources, learnt about you, Senior Assistant Commissioner Felie Mujanga and your significant fresh engagement as the ZRP National Traffic’s new broom.
Now, at this point in Zimbabwe, that is a really significant appointment. Your dizzying, up-the-ladder SAC position is just two rungs below Zimbabwe’s numero uno cop, Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri. Therefore, we have reason to believe that, if you ever felt like it, you possessed noteworthy, state-inspired authority to deal a knock-out blow to the relentless road carnage.

As customary to our polite, ubuntu culture, Traffic Friday pronounces to you genuine congratulations; makorokoto. No beating-about-the-bush though; yours is a burdensome and time-sensitive task.

Any slackening means that your service men and women will be called upon frequently, to the disheartening task of picking up decapitated bodies from our roads.

Your brief, as the commander of National Traffic, surely is clear-cut. ‘Chef’ (as your police subordinates are wont to call you in local police protocol), Zimbabwe has a sobering, road traffic accident (RTA) crisis. The grim numbers are faithful; they paint a sorry picture of widespread driving lawlessness.

I believe that your demanding assignment is to provide intelligent team leadership and enthusiastically monitor the consistent execution of operations by your subordinates.

Your prime target, indisputably, is halting the utter carnage that rules-and-reigns today. No point in reminding you that commuter omnibus drivers (many of them too young and inadequately licensed) invent most of the RTA trouble.

The private motorist is no saint; he does not always drive soberly. He often overestimates his driving abilities and the actual performance of his vehicle and foolishly overlooks existing weather conditions. He, too, plays a substantial part in the mayhem.

Madam Top Cop, please add to your challenges pedestrians that unthinkingly wander all over the road, disregarding traffic light signals, crossing the road wherever and howsoever as long as they have crossed the road.

Sadly, the very simple act of crossing a road in Zimbabwe can turn out to be a deadly endeavour, but it need not be so.
Remember the heart-rending National Sports Stadium tragedy, where a Warren Park woman, Simbisai Mumango and her children who were mowed-down at, of all places, a well-marked pedestrian crossing, on exiting the stadium? That unforgettable accident prompted, in a remarkable act of empathy, President Mugabe to telephone the inconsolable family condemning the pervasiveness of RTAs on our roads.

SAC, the picture of your demanding task could not be clearer.
Drink-driving is a long-standing, much-ignored menace, crying out for attention. ZRP National Traffic has to, must acquire legal breathalysers to evict the drunks off our roads. The courts have been kind. They have locked up in the past year dozens of worthless drivers.

At the heart of curbing the carnage on Zimbabwean roads are two critical players; the driver and the cop. The driver has generally shown he doesn’t want to play ball (anorovera bhora mudondo), so that leaves the cop with her famed long arm-of-the-law, to impose approved behaviour. Deadly road crime cannot be tolerated any longer, not under your watch SAC. It is astonishing that the whole might of police has seemingly failed/ignored the infamous Avondale-City-Avondale pirate taxis and many other notorious traffic hotspots, to the detriment of order on the roads.

Sadly, your road policing task is made much more onerous as your cop colleagues were no longer sworn ‘to protect and to serve’. A regular reader of this column sarcastically insists the traffic police motto has to be, ‘to harass and to rob’. How you will deal with the internal corruption is your baby, but you surely need to suffocate the corrupt lot among your men and women. Just one rotten apple can spoil a whole basket of good fruit.

Madam, Traffic Friday is pissed-off by most of your traffic cops; they publicly act too buddy-buddy with commuter omnibus drivers.
It is strange to see a policeman/woman lovingly holding hands with a kombi driver, laughing out loudly like long lost friends, yet at most times, the kombi and its driver are a crime scene!

Also, the fishy business of a kombi conductor hurriedly jumping out and clandestinely transacting with the police behind his vehicle smells of rotten intent. In many police precincts around the world, cops are ordered to serve you seated in your vehicle. Such clean cops address you boldly, loudly and respectfully; proudly exercising state authority, without fear or favour.

Finally, I also feel that the traffic police must be a well-rewarding, highly-trained, specialist troop for high-performance cops.
See, easily ZRP traffic police could be an advertisement for top-class, no-nonsense, professional policing. It’s the only time most ‘members of the public’ — including visitors to Zimbabwe — ever closely connect with the police. This column counsels that traffic police unfailingly present their best-foot-forward in that minute interaction. SAC, please up your game; remember that policing in 2014 is not necessarily about ‘force’. It is about employing effective modern technology, smart strategy and building trusty relations with your customers, ‘members of the public’.

The bizarre, laughable, on-foot, kombi-chasing, windscreen-smashing traffic cop is uncouth and dismal PR. It’s the holidays; please keep the driving ‘happy, happy; happy-happy-happy!’

Gerald Maguranyanga moderates Road Safety Africa, on www.facebook.com/RoadSafetyAfrica, an interactive community page that solicits ideas to curb road traffic accidents in Zimbabwe and Africa. Contacts: WhatsApp only +263 772 205 300; email: [email protected]