A system that failed a father

LAST week a tragic scene unfolded at the busy intersection of Robert Mugabe Road and Inez Terrace in Harare, where a young father was struck and killed during a high-speed police chase, according to witnesses.

According to accounts from those who were there, moments earlier, he had been stopped for mistakenly driving the wrong way on a poorly marked one-way street and instructed by police to pay a fine at the charge office.

While he complied, his car — with his children still inside — was clamped by city council marshals.

Panic led him to run after the marshals. In that moment, one of the high-speed vehicles veered off course and struck the distraught father, throwing him into the air before his body hit a windscreen and then lay lifeless on the tarmac for nearly an hour — unassisted and unseen in a city teeming with officers. His children, trapped and screaming in the car, watched every agonising moment. 

I find this narrative almost unbearable — not only because of its human tragedy, but because it exposes a pattern that has become disturbingly familiar in modern Zimbabwe: policing that values control over compassion, punishment over proportionality, revenue collection over human life.

This man’s death is not an unfortunate accident; it is a mirror held up to a system that consistently privileges authority, intimidation and profit rather than service, sensitivity, and the sacred protection of life.

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Within the central business district of Harare, one no longer walks with confidence but with trepidation.

At any corner, one could encounter officers engaged in a reckless high-speed chase of a commuter minibus or an informal taxi, often weaving dangerously through pedestrians and vendors, disregarding the bustling density of the urban core. These are not rare moments — they are a daily spectacle of danger masquerading as enforcement. 

It is not about excusing those who defy traffic regulations or operate unlicensed vehicles; law must always have meaning.

But law without logic, without proportion and without humanity ceases to be law — it becomes aggression under colour of authority.

Every responsible citizen understands that traffic offences must be addressed, but the method of enforcement matters deeply.

When police pursue commuter omnibuses across crowded intersections, they do not merely endanger defiant drivers; they place in mortal peril passengers who are simply trying to get to work, school or home. The impulse to demonstrate control, to assert dominance and to extract fines often overrides the primary duty of policing: to protect.

The visual theatre of enforcement — sirens, chases, shouts — replaces the quiet professionalism of service. It is the prioritisation of spectacle over safety, of punishment over prevention and of profit over life.

In this fatal case, the chain of failure is unbearable to contemplate. A poorly marked one-way street invited confusion.

A rigid policing procedure forced a young man to abandon his vehicle — and his children — to settle a minor offence at a distant charge office. A city council eager to demonstrate authority or fill coffers compounded the distress by clamping the car in the driver’s absence.

Then came the chase — the emblem of a policing culture untethered from prudence — and at last, the silence of systemic neglect as a wounded man bled for nearly an hour in the heart of the capital, ignored by the very institutions that exist to protect him. Each link in that sequence betrayed an absence of empathy, of communication, and of coordination; together they formed a perfect storm of bureaucratic cruelty.

What deepens the injury is the haunting image of two children — eyes wide open, faces pressed against the glass — watching their father collapse, bleeding, waiting, dying.

That is not merely trauma; that is lifelong psychological injury inflicted by the State’s indifference.

These children will carry not only grief but fear — fear of the very uniforms meant to protect them.

Their trust in authority has been stolen, replaced by the ghostly replay of that day’s events. Behind every systemic failure lies a human cost and in this case, the cost is beyond repair. The breadwinner is gone, the memory irreversibly poisoned, the family broken at the intersection of official negligence and procedural arrogance.

One cannot ignore the omnipresent menace of the clamping culture in Harare’s CBD. City council marshals prowl the streets with mechanical cruelty, clamping vehicles with little regard for circumstance, safety, or fairness.

They are often viewed less as instruments of order and more as predators of desperation — operating with a zeal that seems driven by revenue targets rather than civic sense.

Their actions, frequently independent of police logic, sow confusion, frustration, and, as in this case, chaos.

When the agents of order behave without coordination or moral sense, the entire civic fabric frays. Harare has become a city where ordinary citizens move through its core not as participants in shared order but as hostages to overlapping authorities — police, marshals, inspectors — each anxious to extract something, none willing to protect.

The absence of emergency response in the aftermath of this tragedy must disturb us even more.

That a man could lie bleeding in the CBD for nearly an hour without medical attention testifies to a terrifying reality: life-saving response systems in Zimbabwe’s capital are not only inadequate; they are nearly non-existent.

In that one-hour window, the possibility of survival disintegrated, not because help was unavailable in theory, but because our systems do not move for the ordinary man. Ambulances arrive late, sometimes never.

Coordination between police, hospitals and emergency services is disjointed. Lives that could be saved are casually surrendered to time. This indifference reflects not budget constraints alone, but a policy mentality that does not treat life as sacred enough to mobilise immediate action.

The conclusion, then, is not that individuals erred in isolation, but that our entire civic infrastructure is infected by misaligned priorities. The institutions of policing and civic management now seem motivated primarily by revenue and optics rather than public safety and humane service.

Each clamp, each chase, each fine extracted with indifference — all are symptoms of a State that too often treats its people as sources of income rather than as lives of dignity.

The death in Robert Mugabe Road is, therefore, not an oddity; it is a mirror reflecting the chronic decay of empathy in our public systems.

I write this as someone deeply touched and outraged — not out of partisan impulse, but human conscience.

A man who had done no more than make a minor traffic error has died; his children witnessed it in brutal clarity; and the institutions meant to prevent such tragedy instead orchestrated it.

This death was not written by fate, but by failure — by procedural stubbornness, by profit-driven governance, by an absence of compassion. As a nation, we must decide whether we will continue to normalise such institutional savagery or reclaim a policing culture that places humanity before bureaucracy. Because unless we learn from the blood stains in Robert Mugabe Road, the next tragedy is not a question of if, but when.

• Lawrence Makamanzi is an independent researcher and analyst, passionately sharing his insights in a personal capacity.