There is an unwritten rule among bartenders that prohibits a discussion about politics from behind the counter or sale desk mainly because with each sip swallowed inhibitions are lowered to a point where patrons are willing to swap organs and publicly share their infidelity. Gutter politics has the same effect on people hence Botswana’s current politics resembles an ill-fated play in a lousy theatre where kids feign adulthood and old timers feel completely out of place. Enjoy your drugs fellows but read this please!
On or about September 29 many Batswana took time to travel to various destinations, mostly to their home villages. In fact, the practice is that during public holidays many people are presented with a window of opportunity to travel to their home villages. A majority of travellers generally prefer to use their private vehicles for convenience and prestige. Given that the number of motor vehicles in Botswana has increased tremendously, it would mean that holidays, month ends and weekends are characterized by traffic congestion on our poorly designed highways.
It has to be noted that the increase in the numbers of motor vehicles has not been matched by a corresponding increase in road space. While it is generally believed that public transport is much safer than private vehicles ostensibly because public transport operators are stringently obliged to adhere to traffic rules in order to save the lives of passengers, traffic congestion makes public transport less efficient and unreliable. As a result, travellers prefer private vehicles that somewhat allow them to recklessly and dangerously snake through the traffic that often looks like a motorcade.
Thus, private vehicles offer convenience in the form of aiding travellers to reach their destinations much earlier and flexibility in the sense of freedom to choose where to stop and what to drink in the car. Unfortunately, preference for private vehicles partly for enhanced cruising and swerving as a way of skipping the highway queue means that travelling to and from our home villages is now a means to death. This conjecture should be apparent mostly to those who often have to travel long distances due to the distance between their job stations and their home villages essentially because being behind the steering wheel for several hours is a cruel challenge.
It is documented that Botswana has the second highest prevalence of road crash fatalities in the SADC region. A combination of speeding and drunk driving is often cited as a key factor that causes road accidents. This is in spite of the regular road safety campaigns and highway patrols along major roads mounted to ensure the safety of road users. Vision 2016 also highlighted the need to substantially lower incidence of death and serious injury arising from road accidents. These efforts by the government and other stakeholders are laudable but there is still much to be done to reduce fatalities on our roads. To those who had the harrowing experience of having buried their loved ones [and many of us have lost count of them] who lost their lives due to road traffic accidents, this essay is a reminder that travelling on road is actually like pushing our maker to hasten us into eternal rest much against HIS will.
Whereas at times authorities record a slight decrease in road deaths and serious injuries, the painful reality is that far too many people die on Botswana’s roads and this is unacceptable. On different occasions, this column has discussed this spectre of road deaths and had proffered some workable interventions, including lowering the national speed limit to 100km/h; introducing road marshals; evaluating the effectiveness of fences in preventing animals from entering highways and so forth. While addressing specific causes of road accidents, the proposed interventions must be taken to be complementary.
Fundamentally, the proposed interventions share the premise that Botswana had to do something to sort out the road accidents epidemic. In an attempt to harmonize the various pieces of interventions proposed by this column, there is a dire need for Botswana to take a fresh look at the problem of death and injuries on national roads and develop a comprehensive plan of action in the mould of the Swedish Vision Zero Road safety policy that has attracted worldwide attention.
Basically, Botswana has to seriously consider a National Road Safety Policy or Road Safety Vision that will represent a radical departure from the present practice of exclusively faulting road users whenever a motor accident occurs towards a holistic focus that places responsibility for road accidents on the entire system particularly road infrastructure design and enforcement. This shift in approach will be based on an appreciation that past interventions have not resulted in any significant improvements in road safety as people continue to die like damned insects.
The new approach should necessarily represent a new start derived from a radical, result-oriented mode of operation that assigns the blame for road accidents to the overall failure of the road system rather than motorists. The premise upon which this approach rests is that the road system has to take into account that mistakes are unavoidable hence the need to create a system that minimizes the risk of motorists making mistakes. The painful truth is that many of our roads are just a death trap with unacceptably narrow lane widths and dangerous intersections that do not have acceleration lanes. The proposed approach departs from an over-obsession with ticketing towards improving road infrastructure while also mobilizing all role players within the transport industry to pool resources together. The proposed Road Safety Vision would be used to inform policy makers to theorize and develop road transport policies in a more systematic fashion.
Since Batswana are now familiar with visioning having had Vision 2016 and now using Vision 2036 to monitor their march to the Promised Land, developing a vision for road safety would be a logical way to mobilize all role players to work collectively towards achieving set targets. In particular, a national road safety vision will extract the necessary political will which has always been in short supply with previous interventions. In order to extort the requisite political will at the highest level, the proposed road safety vision will provides for the creation of a Parliamentary standing committee responsible for road safety.
The envisaged road safety vision will stimulate and challenge Batswana to dream big and have an individual and collective vision that everyone will be safe on our roads. It will challenge Batswana to make it a reality precisely by taking an active role in actualizing it. Most importantly, it will spell out mutually agreed quantitative and qualitative realistic targets for reducing deaths and serious injuries on national roads, with clearly stated timelines for attaining the specified targets. The vision will also spell out mechanisms to coordinate and monitor implementation on a regular basis so that all role players are kept on their toes. This particular game plan will ensure that the Road Safety Vision is not forgotten as was the case with Vision 2016.
It has to be acknowledged that Botswana has a very small population and the 1000 death resulting from road accidents annually must be examined in the context of our small population. Whereas the loss of human life is generally bad and natural, the loss of life resulting from preventable causes is unacceptable.
Road accident fatalities may not have reached epidemic levels as was the case with AIDS deaths in the 1990s when each weekend was marked with a ritual of funerals for friends or family members who died of AIDS. Nevertheless, the problem of road accidents deaths need to be tackled decisively the same way Rre Mogae did with HIV/AIDS. Former President Rre Mogae first acknowledged the threat of the disease to the country warning that if no firm action was taken, Botswana’s population would be wiped out, literally. He agonisingly warned that ‘Botswana is threatened with extinction’.
In order to save Botswana, Rre Mogae then pledged to make the fight against HIV a national priority thereby helping Botswana put in a place one of Africa’s most progressive and comprehensive programs for dealing with the disease. As a result of government’s commitment to addressing the crisis, a commitment championed by the Head of State, Botswana has seen a dramatic drop in AIDS related deaths. We need the same commitment from the in-coming state president in dealing with the problem of road accident fatalities and the proposed Road Safety Vision could be the ideal starting point.
