Death has become a common occurrence in Zimbabwe that it is mostly met with the usual mourning where family members gather and bury their dead according to their traditions.
NewsDay Editorial
During public holidays such as the just-ended Independence Day and Easter festivities, death usually becomes interesting as a statistic. Newspapers update their readers on the number of deaths recorded on the roads etc and life goes on.
But there are deaths which jolt the nation; everyone is plunged into mourning. Such a one is the death of three-year-old Neil Tanatswa Mutyora, who was hit by a commuter omnibus at the intersection of Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and Chinhoyi Street on Tuesday.
The innocent boy was walking in the area in the company of an adult when the kombi hit him. His lifeless body was ferried in an ambulance to hospital.
Even if the ambulance did carry him, contrary to common practice where ambulances don’t carry dead bodies, it was clear the boy was dead.
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
It is impossible to imagine the pain through which the parents of the boy are going through. It is the kind of nightmare that every adult Zimbabwean, especially one who has been a parent, doesn’t wish on his or her worst enemy. What is most painful about the boy’s death is that everyone saw it coming.
Acres of space have been expended in newspapers columns, particularly in NewsDay, urging the police and the Harare City Council to do something about the traffic jungle that has become Harare City.
Only recently NewsDay published a centrespread article explaining the dangers of the war playing out between the police and commuter omnibus drivers. Besides the usual jejune statements from police public relations officials, no concrete action has ever been taken to come up with an intelligent police operation to control the movement of pirate commuter omnibus drivers plying city roads.
And the problem is not confined to Harare alone. There is a case playing out in the courts in the country’s second city — Bulawayo — where again errant police offices nearly caused a fatal accident when they threw spikes in the road to stop fleeing kombi drivers.
Last week senior police officers walked across Harare ostensibly to see for themselves what is happening on city roads. But watchers knew this was just another public relations stunt.
Commentators also allege senior police are non-committal in dealing with this menace because they are the biggest beneficiaries. They either own the commuter omnibuses themselves or enrich themselves through demanding bribes from the kombi drivers.
Whichever way this scourge is examined, the buck stops with the police. Everyone would be hard-pressed to imagine that the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) cannot come up with effective strategies to control traffic in the cities’ central business districts, if they themselves do not benefit from the chaos.
Someone in the ZRP should take responsibility for the death of the boy and that somebody should be Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri. The buck stops with him!
