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Wrecked: The car which Mafirakurewa was driving

ZIMBABWE’s blood soaked roads have once again connived to rob the country of human life. A vibrant young man’s future has been cruelly cut short by the carnage on the country’s roads. The tragic death of Chronicle Business Editor Mernat Mafirakurewa in a horrific accident along the Harare-Masvingo Highway on Wednesday night once again exposed the country’s failings in terms of road safety.
While the accident was caused by human error, according to preliminary police investigations, the state of the road itself could have contributed to the tragedy which happened on a narrow stretch of the busy highway.

Mernat died when the vehicle he was driving collided head-on with a South Africa-bound bus at the 65km peg of the highway near Beatrice.

Police said the accident happened when the driver of the King Lion bus tried to overtake another vehicle and in the process encroached onto the lane of Mernat’s Honda Fit vehicle. Both the bus and the Honda Fit overturned on impact resulting in the death of Mernat on the spot and a passenger on the bus.

Roberta Katunga — a Sunday News senior business reporter travelling with Mernat to a National Tourism Policy launch in Harare, sustained injuries and is admitted to a Harare private hospital. While both deaths are regrettable, they could have been avoided had the road been wide enough to accommodate both vehicles and had the driver of the bus taken due care and attention before attempting to overtake.

Without trying to magnify the horror of this particular accident, statistics indicate that the carnage on our roads has increased over the years because we have neglected to rehabilitate our road infrastructure in tandem with the increased volume of vehicular traffic. Clearly the amount of traffic on the country’s major highways warrants a major overhaul of the road network as a matter of urgency. Our roads will continue to be death traps unless government makes a deliberate decision to prioritise their rehabilitation. Group Five is doing a sterling job resurfacing the Plumtree-Mutare highway but this is not enough. The dualisation of the Harare-Bulawayo road should have been completed ages ago and this would have gone a long way in reducing accidents along this route — one of the busiest in the country.

In the same vein, the Harare-Masvingo-Beitbridge highway is another traffic congested route requiring urgent rehabilitation.
The volume of heavy vehicles along these roads entails that the wear and tear is massive. Government should enter into Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) arrangements with external entities to finance the rehabilitation of roads. The following routes should take first priority — Harare-Chirundu; Harare-Masvingo-Beitbridge; Bulawayo-Beitbridge and Victoria Falls-Bulawayo. In a recent report, the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport and Infrastructural Development said that nearly 30,000 people were killed in road accidents between 1997 and 2013 with 85 percent of the accidents blamed on human error.

MPs listed 12 other causes of accidents that include bad state of roads, speeding, drunken driving, fatigue, use of cell phones when driving and driving through red robots. The use of second hand tyres, stationary and defective vehicles, stray animals on the roads, inadequate road signage and markings as well as lack of traffic enforcement were also cited. We urge Government to take this report’s findings seriously and institute corrective measures.

We also call on drivers, particularly of public transport vehicles and haulage trucks, to exercise caution on the roads and value the sanctity of human life. Lack of patience and speeding are some of the causes of accidents cited in the Committee report and the driver of the King Lion bus was clearly found wanting in this regard.