Administering medicine to the dead

Safety measures by the Government often come after an incident or accident has occurred and many lives and property have been lost.

The reaction is like administering medicine to the dead. Or, like rushing to close the stables when the horses had long galloped afield; or, better still, going to fetch water with a broken calabash.

Since the Government has not put in place a rapid response mechanism, when ever there is a happenstance, they get confused and in their frenzy, they take decisions that do not produce the desired results, or take decisions which will not even curb recurrence of such incidents.

Most often, this lack of a rapid response mechanism in place, always makes them to react frantically, thereby creating more problems.

I remember when many accidents at night involving intra-urban buses were reported, the then Minister of Transport reacted by banning the buses from operating at night. Was that the solution to the problem? Were the accidents occurring because the buses were plying at night?

Had the unions not protested, the ban would have gone on. And if the accidents occurred during the day, would the Minister have banned travelling by day? That way, there would be a ban of travel by night and ban on travel by day, therefore a ban on travel. There will be no movement of persons, goods and services. Imagine that kind of situation; the economy would collapse, the Government would collapse, and so on. In fact, that would be a collapse of the entire society.

Ndokoti has always thrived in anarchy and the authorities never bothered, until a truck crushed bendskin riders. That is when the authorities woke up from slumber to ban selling under the bridge and the operation of roadside businesses in the area.

There are so many factors that are responsible for road accidents; the state of the road, the state of the vehicle, the state of the driver, and so on.

It is not only in the transport domain that the Government is renowned for doing nothing until there is a road mishap, then, it runs helter-skelter to take frenetic decisions that most often do not assuage the problem. And in that frenzy, they don’t see that they are either partially or entirely responsible for the mishap.

Therefore, not all accidents that occur are due to the driver or to the vehicle. Some are caused by the state of the road. Take, for instance, the Bamenda-Bafoussam road, which President Ahmadou Ahidjo built some four decades ago, has outlived its usefulness and has become a death trap. Anything can happen to the newest vehicle and the most competent driver plying the road.

The Bamenda-Douala, Douala-Yaounde and Yaounde-Bamenda axis, otherwise known as the ‘devils axis’, has drained a lot of Cameroonian blood and brains. Fifty years after independence, at least this high-traffic axis, should have been dual carriage-ways a long time ago.

The persons who came-up with the idea of toll gates [which idea the regime stole and implemented] intended that, such road-use taxes and other resources, would be ploughed back into road maintenance and construction. Today, the regime, its employs, agents and assigns rather use such resources in what someone has referred to as building “stomach infrastructure.”

One of the solutions civilised societies use to avoid accidents caused by or involving trailers and trucks do not ply the streets of a town during the day. These heavy duty vehicles that transport containers, timber, cement, sand, stones and other building materials drive into town only at night when there is limited human movement.

Towns and cities create truck and trailer parks at all gateways where the park and drive into town only after a certain hour at night, deliver their goods and leave before a certain hour in the morning. Even the ones that supply the cities with provision at night because human traffic is highest during the day as people go and come either from work or business.

That reminds me of my secondary school days in Kumba in the 80s when Deep Cam enterprise was run by the Indians. Stock would be finished at the close of the day, but customers came back the following morning to find the shelves replenished and the shop full again. Because we could not understand this, stories were wild that the Indians conjured the goods that disappeared from their factories and warehouses in India and appeared in the supermarket in Kumba and filled the shop.

The Indians might have just been judicious to apply the laws in their country, here in Cameroon, where trucks are not found in the day on the streets of their towns.

Laws and policies in such civilised societies managed by Governments made up of civilised people are complimented by good road infrastructure to guarantee safety and security on their roads.

Unfortunately, most of these trucks are owned by the same members of the regime – and their greed would not allow them adopt such laws and policies. Are We Together?