swazidayz

... happening in Swaziland

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Mobile coffins

Yes, I know this is the same title as an article written some years ago by Vusi Ginindza—I still remember him writing it; and yes, I know that that article was so hotly received that a vigilante mob of busmen descended on these same Times offices, aiming to add injury to injury; and, yes, I also know that much ink has already been spilt about the recent bus crashes; but it seems to me that spilling ink is always preferable to spilling blood. Unfortunately, what Vusi wrote about then is still happening now.
It does seem that here in Swaziland we never learn from the past. How many cattle have to stray onto our roads before we realise that people are more important than cows? How many drunken drivers have to be locked up before we realise that drinking and driving don’t mix? How many children have to end up scarred and maimed for life or sealed in wooden boxes before we realise that buses, fishes, kombis, sprinters, taxis and the rest are supposed to provide a service for the public rather than provide an opportunity for the transport industry’s chancers?
The chancers—those owners who are so obsessed with making money that they don’t want to pay to maintain their vehicles; those drivers who are so obsessed with proving that they are the ‘men’ of the roads that they speed and swerve as if they are literally on the highway to hell; those conductors who are so obsessed with conducting some of the profits into their own pockets that their owners’ vehicles finish a journey and then almost immediately are forced to turn around to make another, allowing no rest for either man or machine.
Look, it doesn’t matter overmuch if a journey takes a long time—but it does matter if some of the passengers never get there. The point of being in a bus is primarily to get to where you want to go.
Because of where I live I regularly get to drive past buses that have broken down during a journey, and often too I get to see the weary, long-suffering passengers, who have had to abandon a dead bus, struggling up the hill, using good old reliable SD10 to get them there.
Yet even SD10 can get you hurt these days, since some public transport drivers are so reckless that pedestrians get bumped too.
Mobile coffins. Not all of them, it’s true. Maybe not even most of them. But some of them? You bet. And why, just why, should members of the public have to put their lives on the line because of the chancers? The people do—many of them every day—because they have to. The transport industry is a service industry: that is, it offers an essential service to the public, and therefore it is not only open to public scrutiny but also requires tough regulation by government.
Here’s something that you can do to open your eyes: go to the Mbabane Plaza car park after hours and count the number of kombis and fishes and sprinters that are parked there overnight. You will likely be shocked, as I was, for there are so many. And that’s just in one spot. Multiply that spot throughout the country and you will begin to see how big this industry is.
Whether the minister cried or not is not an issue, but the proliferation of these vehicles is. Recently the city council said it needed to build a bigger bus rank to house all of these buses. Yet I can tell you that a new rank, however big it is, will also become too small if things continue the way they have. Already the transport industry is stretching government’s ability to police it, and the people are dying.