How strong are our buses?

How strong are bodies of our buses in preventing high death toll?

On Thursday the Deputy Minister for Public Safety and Security, Mohamed Aboud toured areas along the Dar es Salaam, Morogoro road notorious for some of the worst motor accidents in the country’s history.

The minister visited the spots at Kibaha and Chalinze, both in Coast region.

The section around Kibaha was a few days ago the scene of a major road accident that involved a bus company christened Champion bus.

In that accident, 16 people died on the spot and a few days later three more people died bringing the death toll to 19.

Over 40 people were injured, some of them very seriously.

During Aboud’s visit at the notorious road sections, he made numerous suggestions to the traffic police on how road carnage, especially at the notorious sections could be curbed.

Because the Champion’s driver has already been committed to court, it would be contempt of court to discuss anything related to that accident.

However, one thing that is worthy discussing today, with a view to reducing these road carnage, is what the minister said in relation to the quality of the body of our passenger buses.

The minister now becomes the first senior government official, but the second person in living memory to touch on the quality of the body of our buses.

Again, for certain reasons that border on the media law of privacy, I would not like to mention the name of the second, and actually, the first man to raise the issue of standards of body buses.

However, to understand what the minister was driving at, it would be pertinent to flash back to what the first man to raise the issue said last year.

The man, one of the leading transporters in the country, had called on the government to look into possibility of ensuring that locally build bodies for buses met the required international standard.

The transporter noted that experience had shown that whenever many people were killed in a passenger bus, more often than not the body of such a bus would have been locally made.

His argument was that because many locally assembled bus bodies manufacturing companies did not adhere to international standards, whenever such buses overturned, they have their roofs separated from the other parts of the body.

What that meant was that materials used for joining the roof of such buses with their bodies was not strong enough to keep the bus intact as it rolls after say a tyre burst.

Despite raising such a pertinent point that is relevant to the safety of passengers, nothing was done by authority concerned and the carnage has continued unabated!

Even an institution like the Tanzania Bureau of Standards, TBS, elected to remain mum over an issue it should have been closely involved in.

But what some authority is more concerned is not the safety of mass of people using bus transport, but individuals most of whom have numerous choices when it comes to choosing the mode of travel.

For instance, we now hear of stories about buying cars that are from 90s onwards.

Others are regarded as junk. Yet the same cars that were manufactured in 1990s are equally junk as they were driven in Japan for at least ten years and later reconditioned for Africa and other developing countries.

There was also time when some senior government officials were talking of the need to ensure that only new cars or vehicles were imported.

Yet, if one was to be honest and ask how many Tanzanians were capable of buying new cars, the fact of the matter is that only big businessmen and women can do that.

Members of Parliament have also been driving new vehicles, but we all know who buys such vehicles for them, it is our tax payers.

Most of the senior government officials involved in such weird decisions are warrant holders, people who have government coffers at their disposal.

These are people who do not know the reality outside their cosy, air conditioned offices!

To these people as long as they can afford to get new four wheel drives for their offices which they later buy in subtly arranged auction after seven years, the rest can go to hell as once pronounced by a former minister for communication and transport when he was put to task over Tanzania Railways Corporation’s train

problems to upcountry stations.

It is the hope of many Tanzanians, and in particular, those who have been following road carnage closely that the ministry of public safety and security and would take interest in the quality of bodies of locally made buses.

The private transporter who had tried to raise the issue of the quality of bodies of locally made buses was fought right, left and centre by local manufacturers that he almost lost his business.

It is our hope that the ministry responsible and the TBS will pick a leaf from the Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner, Abbas Kandoro who has decided that he is not going to take any more nonsense from the machingas.

Our only fear is that he may relent, that could be his undoing. He ought to continue to pull the chain by turning Dar es Salaam into one of the best cities in the continent.

That is possible if machingas are given designated areas specifically prepared for their operations.

That is the only way of ensuring that our streets are not turned into shopping malls.

The same thing is applicable to road accidents. It is not enough to talk about the high quality or otherwise of the bodies of our buses.

Those concerned with maintaining such high quality standards ought to work on such problems now.

Otherwise road carnage would continue and that is not fair.

Ends.