I lived by this maxim until I read police spokesperson Phiri's interview on the carnage on our roads this festive season. I got the sense the police were prepared to engage the public on a matter of concern to all of us. In times past, the police have not often talked to us, only choosing to talk at us when the need to deliver some warning or another arises. This time, the flavour of talking was different; he seemed to be genuinely trying to talk to us in a pleasant and informative manner.
Across the world, police forensic reports on road accidents are a vital source of information about how many accidents are happening, where they are happening and who is involved. When analysed critically, they can provide useful information to tailor accident prevention interventions. ZRP must be commended for carrying out this vital job when most of us were celebrating the festive season. Thank you for policing our roads these past few months; it was a job well done.
Numbers do the talking
We have probably all come across statistics about how many millions die every year afrom road traffic accidents. I have found these numbers distressing but often wondered what Zimbabwe’s numbers were like. Since Tongogara's death in 1979, accidents have robbed us of many men and women who had so much to offer our beautiful nation.
Between December 15 and January 9, the police collected data on accidents and the numbers are now in the public domain. In that 25-day stretch, there were 1 476 road accidents, with 228 reported deaths. To put these numbers into perspective, this translates to 59 accidents a day, roughly three accidents every hour; that's an accident every 20 minutes. And of these accidents, there were at least nine deaths a day, that's someone dying every two and a half hours. What can be more tragic than every couple of hours somewhere in our country, a father, mother, son, daughter, sibling, or colleague prematurely killed in a road traffic crash? And for every death, many more are disabled, some permanently.
Such pain and suffering is unacceptable, given that we have the knowledge needed to prevent road traffic accidents. Decades of research has taught us that these road “accidents” often are not entirely random accidents. If one were to summarize the causes of road accidents, they could be conceptualized as the three B's: bad drivers, driving bad cars on bad roads.
Beyond the numbers
Having a handle on how many accidents there are and how many people needlessly die is not very useful as an end in itself. The challenge for us as a nation is to create an environment of safe drivers, driving safe vehicles on safe roads. No doubt, a useful starting point is to systematically analyse where these accidents occur and identify preventable risk factors as part of a comprehensive national accident prevention programme.
It is on this part of analysing the data that I found Phiri's contribution somewhat underwhelming. When asked what the cause of accidents was, Phiri had this to say: “the major cause of these accidents is human error. If I may care to catalogue the causes as we have seen them this year, we have speeding, misjudgment, following too close behind, overtaking error, reversing error and turning error and this to me is centred on human behaviour”.
Without the benefit of looking at all the data, I am not in a position to speak authoritatively on the authenticity of this conclusion and in the final analysis this may well be accurate. In the interest of adequately informing the public, I'd urge ZRP to come up with other more compelling methods of disseminating vital statistical data. Graphs illustrating the proportion of men and women involved in accidents and the different age groups of drivers would be important. We'd also be interested to know what proportion of fatal accidents involved drunk drivers and perhaps some metric that tries to assess the contribution of infrastructure.
Without seeing compelling data, a part of me feels the senior officer may have ignored the contribution of other elephants in the room. Things like the story state of our roads littered with potholes large enough to drown giraffes, the lack of working traffic lights and how many people were were immediately after the accident but died due to a lack of a rapid response system.
Whether the selective omission of these other issues is accidental or deliberate is hard to say. For while ultimately the buck stops with the road users, it is somewhat disingenuous to lay all the blame at their feet.
Less is more
Given how Phiri attempts to convince us our cops have gone 'beyond the call of duty' by pulling out all stops to get all cops to man our roads, the question must be asked, do more “officers” on our roads reduce accidents?
The short answer is, it depends on where on the road they are and what they are up to. As a passenger, I find it interesting to watch how road blocks influence driving behaviour. Paradoxically, the more dodgy roadblocks there were, the more drivers tended to over-speed. The police were creating speeding zones.
The UN has declared a Decade of Action on Road Safety. We all have to congratulate ZRP by taking a crucial first step in being a vehicle for the dissemination of vital data that will hopefully shape policy decisions. When analysing the data, all efforts should be made to avoid massaging it to tell a more palatable story. If we choose not to address these issues, then we doom ourselves to reliving tragedies like the past festive season on our roads. And what better way to venerate the memory of the dead and the grief of their loved ones than to make sure the tragedy that has befallen them does not repeat itself? These innocent people cannot have died in vain.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis