Tomorrow everyone will be trooping back into town; I mean those who would have survived the holiday madness.
Editor’s Desk by Nevanji Madanhire
The papers will be full of bad statistics. The debate will be on again about why there are so many accidents and so many deaths on Zimbabwe’s roads.
Bad roads will be blamed. Alcohol will also be blamed. The police will again attribute the accidents to reckless driving and driving under the influence. A few days later the debate will die down only to be resurrected in August during the Heroes’ Day holidays.
Let’s look at the problem another way. I will begin by asking a question. Who trains Zimbabwean drivers?
An unemployed person happens to have a car, writes on it “Good Luck Driving Academy” and he is on the road teaching people how to drive. Raise your hand if this is not what’s happening in Zimbabwe? And what kind of drivers does he produce? Good luck drivers of course!
A person cannot be deemed to have a skill if he hasn’t been to college! Driving instruction is not unskilled work. To be an instructor in any field, one has got to have a qualification. Is it possible to belabour this point?
Now let’s begin from the beginning. Let’s have something called the “College of Driving Instructors” or whatever you may choose to call it. Like all colleges, there have to be entry qualifications. Last time I said drivers should have at least some proof that they sat for Ordinary Level examinations. Of course I was accused of elitism.
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What about instructors? Of course one cannot be entrusted with imparting an important skill such as driving without having a certain academic achievement. Teachers go to college for at least three years before they can be trusted with our children! Likewise, driving instructors should go to college before they can be trusted with learner drivers.
The college should have a curriculum properly developed by experts. One of the subjects should be basic mechanics. Any driver ought to know what happens in the engine when he or she turns the key in the ignition.
They should know what a propeller shaft is or what drive shafts are.
They should know what it means to close car doors; they should know what the codes moulded on the side of the tyre mean. The codes tell the size of the tyre and also its limitations. It tells what loads the tyre can carry and also the maximum speed it can go at.
Did our instructors ever give us this information? They didn’t, hence one of the causes of road accidents is overloading and the other is speeding. Motorists drive at speeds their tyres cannot sustain.
They load their cars to the roof when the tyres cannot carry the weight. It’s not their fault; their instructor never told them anything about tyres, mainly because he too didn’t know.
If you go to some backyard tyre sales, you will find workman deepening used tyre treads using scalpels! They tell their customers to look at the deep tyre treads and the innocent motorists buy the modified tyres. Too bad! Their driving instructors never taught them what tyre treads do on the road nor how fake treads change the tyre profile completely.
How often have we heard motorists tell service station attendants to “faka” pressure in their wheel and to “please over inflate it because it has a slow puncture!” The argument is that by the time the motorist reaches his destination, there would still be “enough pressure”. But the truth is the tyre never had the same profile at any two moments throughout the journey! That is very dangerous. If a wheel has a slow puncture, it has no business on the road, the driving instructor should have told his students that.
Learner drivers should be taught about the different lights on their vehicle. Most drivers have no clue what brake lights are all about.
They don’t know what role reverse lights play. Forget about parking lights. One of the greatest jokes — a sad one at that — on our roads is what some motorists use in place of breakdown triangles. Some put green leaves on the tarmac; others place an empty plastic container. They don’t care what colour it is.
I have seen black containers on the tarmac. What it means is the driver has absolutely no clue what purpose the reflective breakdown triangle serves. This is exactly what learner drivers should be taught in college by qualified instructors.
During the festive season last year 63 people perished in a single accident when a haulage truck driver loaded them on his truck. This was the result of a lack of education. He didn’t know how many tonnes the people weighed or what load his tyres could carry. All this didn’t matter to him; he must have just loaded the people and told them, “Good luck.”
The curriculum should also include elementary civil engineering so the drivers can appreciate all the forces at play on the roads. They should appreciate the centrifugal and centripetal forces at play when they negotiate a curve. Often motorists lose control of their vehicle because they are negotiating curves at high speeds.
They are not aware that there are forces on the roads pushing the vehicle outward when the vehicle is trying to go inward. The road more often than not wins the battle.
Just before the Easter holidays, the Traffic Safety council of Zimbabwe invited various drivers for a “pre-Easter road safety awareness march”. The procession started at Africa Unity Square and proceeded along Jason Moyo Avenue to the Glamis Arena. Poor souls! They wasted three hours of their precious time in a fruitless walk. How their walking was supposed to help their driving — and therefore improve their safety — no one will ever understand.
The three hours could have been better used reminding the drivers of the importance of wheel balancing and wheel alignment. They could have been reminded about braking and how important it is that their brake pads are monitored regularly. Motorists know all this but they need reminding especially going into holidays during which they have to drive long distances.
The Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe should take up the challenge of ensuring that driving instructors are properly qualified. They should work with the police to ensure standards are maintained.
Any instructor without proper qualifications should be arrested. There should come a time when instructors are asked which college they graduated from. This should keep them up to scratch.
