Rising cases of road carnage are abhorrent, especially because most of them of them occurred out sheer recklessness by drivers or poor mechanical state of vehicles.
Taming rogue drivers and removing faulty vehicles from our roads is therefore the cardinal thing that needs attention at all times.
Road safety has certainly become a national concern that requires urgent attention to avoid further injuries and loss of lives.
Rising cases of road carnage are abhorrent, especially because most of them of them occurred out sheer recklessness by drivers or poor mechanical state of vehicles.
Taming rogue drivers and removing faulty vehicles from our roads is therefore the cardinal thing that needs attention at all times.
Unfortunately, our law enforcement agencies have never seemed ready to do the work to the required standards.
All we have are poorly planned, reactionary and shortlived crackdowns on reprobate public transport operators.
What happened this week is a classic example of how bad our law enforcement agencies are at planning and executing road safety campaigns.
Even before the lapse of a two-week notice to public service vehicle operators to fix safety gadgets such as safety belts, some overzealous police officers were already out on the roads trying to enforce the orders. As it has happened previously, public transport operators took to blackmail and pulled their vehicles off the roads. Within a few hours, the so called crackdown had come a cropper amid loud noises from thousands of stranded commuters.
This kind of sloppiness must stop because it only helps to ferment further anarchy on our roads.
Ensuring order on our roads must not be treated as a one-off event but a continuous campaign that spares nobody found in contravention of the traffic safety rules and regulations.
Yielding to blackmail by public transport operators means more people will be killed or maimed on our roads and this must never happen.
Articulate planning will be key to the success of this whole journey because our ultimate goal should be to change the attitude of both commuters and transporters towards safety. This would require a delicate blend of authority, sanctions and soft-skills to win over all road users and make them appreciate that safety starts with each of them.
This means that safety campaigns must go beyond just impounding un-roadworthy vehicles or arresting offending drivers.
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