Editorial Comment: Don’t put commuters’ lives at risk

zimpKombis have replaced buses in urban areas and are providing a vital service to city commuters. Workers rely on kombis that ferry them to work and back. What the kombi operators and their crews should appreciate is that apart from providing the vital urban transport service, they have a responsibility to ensure safety of the commuters.

What this entails is that the operators should only engage qualified drivers to drive the kombis. The government has come up with minimum qualifications for a public service vehicle driver and it is the responsibility of kombi operators to ensure their drivers meet these qualifications.

The kombi driver should be aged 25 years and above, should have undergone defensive driving course and should be medically fit. It is unfortunate that many of the operators are employing unqualified drivers and some even allow touts to drive their kombis  thereby putting the lives of commuters  at risk.

Many of these unqualified drivers try to evade police roadblocks thereby causing accidents. The latest such accident was on Monday when one person died and 17 others were injured when a kombi overturned after crashing into a pick up truck as the driver fled from traffic  police.

The kombi was coming from the city centre heading for the western suburbs when the accident occurred.

Last year, 16 passengers were injured, one of them seriously, when a kombi overturned when the driver attempted to avoid spikes thrown by a police officer who had realised that the driver was attempting to avoid a roadblock.

An innocent life was lost on Monday because the driver was probably avoiding paying a $10 fine. It is such reckless drivers who do not value the lives of their commuters who should be removed from our roads.

Roadblocks, we want to believe, are meant to regulate the movement of traffic on our roads and those drivers who observe the traffic rules and regulations have no reasons to avoid roadblocks. It is the errant drivers who usually want to avoid police roadblocks and many of them drive dangerously as they run away from traffic police officers thereby putting the lives of their passengers at risk.

We have already alluded to the fact that kombi operators have an obligation to ensure only qualified drivers are engaged to drive public service vehicles. The police should therefore not just arrest and fine unqualified drivers but should also punish the offending operators. When these errant drivers evade police roadblocks, police should avoid engaging in high-speed chases as this puts the lives of commuters at risk. There are many cases when kombi drivers have been involved in accidents while fleeing from traffic police.

We want to once again appeal to drivers of public service vehicles to avoid putting the lives of their passengers at risk by attempting to evade roadblocks.

Police on their part should avoid fund-raising from motorists. It has become the norm to have as many as 10 police officers each with a ticket book at a roadblock along a busy road during peak hours in the morning and in the evening collecting fines from motorists. The objective of roadblocks should be to regulate movement of  traffic and not to collect cash as is the case now.

We want to implore both motorists and police officers to complement each other to ensure sanity on our roads in order to save lives.

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