It keeps happening, with 16 people killed and another 40 injured on Friday last week when a Mercedes Benz Sprinter kombi carrying a group of worshippers from the Angels Family Apostolic Church to Chivhu collided head-on with a large haulage truck near Beatrice.
And it is going to get worse so long as we continue to combine good roads, and the Harare-Masvingo highway is now a very good road after its just-finished rebuild, with bad driving, poor enforcement of road rules and lack of sheer common sense.
However you measure it -- deaths per 100km of highway, deaths per vehicle on the roads, deaths per capita -- Zimbabwe has one of the highest rates in the world of road accidents and road deaths. And most drivers continue not to care, simply accept this as normal and then carry on taking unacceptable risks.
So we keep having headlines over the tragedies that hit communities and families. Sixteen killed, four killed, eight killed; the list just goes on and on. And except for the families and colleagues of the dead, no one really seems to be horrified, and no one changes the way they drive. The assumption of immortality by road users is not just astonishing, it is scandalous.
We need to remember that while the deadly accidents involving buses and kombis, or involving well-known people, grab the headlines, every day we have people killed on the roads, plus scores of "minor" accidents, where no one is killed and few are injured, but they keep happening.
The Chivhu accident was particularly horrific for a small group from Epworth in Harare Metropolitan. When you look at the list of those killed, most come from a small number of houses close together, so the relatives who had to go down to Chitungwiza Hospital morgue to identify the dead suddenly find themselves almost alone.
It is for this kind of major accident in a small community where the Government's declaration of disaster, and so the help for the funerals and treatment of the injured, is really essential.
The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development, responsible for creating the traffic regulations and the host ministry of the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe, has been making inroads into prevention and enforcement of its own regulations.
All buses now have to be fitted with speed limiters or speed monitors, allowing the bus companies to see, in real time, just where their drivers are and what speed they are travelling at, and more importantly allowing a small police office to monitor bus traffic 24 hours a day. Accidents still happen, but with buses travelling within the 100km/h limit fewer are fatal. However, not all bus companies have fitted this legally-required equipment, but action can be taken against the hold-outs, like they lose their licences, so soon all will be compliant.
But this is just a start. Haulage companies showed the way with almost all now using satellite tracking to keep control of their fleets. The tracking was introduced for security, as the companies did not want to have trucks or cargo stolen, but the fleet managers also like to know that their drivers are not taking unauthorised diversions and are maintaining steady progress at the proper speed.
The result has been that very few accidents are caused by large trucks, although other vehicles do collide with law-abiding trucks as happened at Beatrice. Many other company fleets have tracking devices in their vehicles, but either no one is monitoring unless a vehicle goes missing, or the company vehicle is driven by senior managers who can ignore the complaints of the junior staffer looking at them speeding. Confidentiality over where the senior manager goes is one thing, but breaking road rules should result in automatic action and there should be no keeping quiet about this.
The police seem under-equipped and low on staff allocated to traffic duties. Almost the whole of the traffic departments at police stations and headquarters are assigned to investigation. They go out to accidents, organise the rescues, sort out the dead and injured, record statements and almost always are able to reconstruct the events that led to the accident and assign blame, charging the guilty and filling in the insurance forms. They do a very good job, but are not really staffed and equipped for prevention.
While most people could assume that it would be a deterrent to fine or even jail drivers who cause an accident, it is obvious that few drivers believe they will ever cause an accident and so they break the law on almost every trip. Some even boast to their friends over how fast they drive over the speed limit, and many pretend that by speeding and shooting red lights they are contributing to their own safety, that is until they are in hospital or until their family are standing around a grave.
Few perhaps realise that they are legally responsible for all costs associated with an accident they cause, from repairing damage to the other car to paying hospital and funeral costs, to even paying compensation to the permanently handicapped or the families of dead breadwinners. The basic insurance legally required is very minimal and must be increased, and while the new road fund now being implemented will help the victims, there is need for better insurance, coming at a cost, of course.
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While the corruption that accompanied police traffic enforcement of trivial rules before the Second Republic negated the whole of this rip-off, it did not in any case tackle the biggest killers. There are some traffic laws that must be enforced and which modern technology makes easy to enforce. Automatic and unmanned speed measurement is one, and the new bus laws are a start there, and having breathalyser tests, especially in the evenings, would be another. Speed and alcohol are the two largest killers.
Countries that go all out to enforce alcohol and speed rules, along with stopping people jumping red lights, have very low accident rates. Sweden and Britain are perhaps the most fanatical, and if Zimbabwe followed their practices we would have about 100 people a year killed on our roads. Enforcement is that effective.
