NewsDay Editorial
Like Tanatswa, the woman was knocked down by a commuter omnibus along Chinhoyi Street.
Eyewitnesses say the driver of the kombi was fleeing baton-wielding police.
The script is the same: Kombi drivers picking and dropping commuters at undesignated points in the CBD and police ostensibly trying to arrest them and make them face the wrath of the law.
But there are several complications in the script. On the part of the police, the main complication is that some of the officers are corrupt and demand bribes in the name of enforcing the law.
On the part of the kombi drivers, their vehicles are often not roadworthy and they brazenly flout all rules of the road in attempts to meet impossible daily targets.
What is clear now is that the police officer and the kombi driver live off each other.
The underpaid officer supplements his salary through the backhanders he gets from kombi drivers by allowing them to, here and there, break the law.
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The kombi driver has impossible revenue targets to achieve; his employer demands he hands over a certain amount of money every day.
The officer knows pretty well the kombi driver cannot achieve his target if he doesn’t break the rules; he encourages him to break the rules so that he can demand his own pound of flesh.
For the kombi driver to achieve his target, he has to do a number of illegal things. He must overload his bus by at least five people. Few commuters are even aware that the additional middle seats in the kombi are illegal.
They also don’t know that there should be just one passenger in the front seat with the driver and that the conductor should have a seat instead of standing by the door.
Therefore, before the kombi even leaves the terminus it has broken a cardinal rule, and to survive, the driver has to bribe the police all the way from point A to point B. But to meet his target he can only bribe so many police officers, hence the cat-and-mouse game.
The kombi driver knows too that the more pick-and-drop passengers he carries, the more money he will make, hence he stops anywhere there is a hand-flagging commuter.
He also knows that the more up-and-down trips he makes, the more likely he is to meet his target; so he speeds, doesn’t stop at the red light, overtakes on the wrong side and sometimes goes up the wrong way of the road.
Corrupt police love this because it helps them meet their own nefarious targets.
This cycle of corruption and errant road usage is now too embedded to be uprooted by a simple instruction from anyone.
There must be a weak link somewhere that should be knocked out so the whole process collapses like a deck of cards.
It just might well be the greedy kombi owners!
