Who should drive our children?

SOME stories shake a nation in a way that words struggle to capture. The news from Gweru this past week is one of those stories.

Seven schoolchildren, who left their homes that morning the way children do every single day, with nothing on their minds except school, friends and the simple business of being young, never made it back home.

They died in a fire that broke out in the commuter omnibus that was supposed to carry them safely to their destination.

By the time the flames were put out, what remained of these young lives was beyond recognition; police have had to rely on DNA tests just to confirm who these children were. Read that again. Parents in Gweru are waiting for science to tell them whether the remains found in that burnt-out kombi belong to their son or their daughter. No parent should ever have to live through that.

What makes this tragedy even harder to accept is how preventable it appears to have been. According to the police, the conductor of the commuter omnibus boarded the vehicle carrying a jerry can with about nine litres of petrol and placed it behind the driver's seat, in a vehicle full of children.

A flame was then seen coming from that spot while the vehicle was moving and within moments, seven young lives were gone. There was no mechanical fault here that nobody could have predicted. There was no sudden act of nature. This was a decision, a choice made by an adult, to carry highly flammable fuel in a passenger vehicle loaded with schoolchildren. When we strip away all the technical language of police statements, what we are left with is a simple and brutal truth. Someone made a careless choice and seven children paid for it with their lives.

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This is where I find myself asking a question that I know many other Zimbabweans are also asking quietly. The driver arrested in connection with this tragedy is 22-years-old. The conductor is 18. I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that every young person is reckless and I am not saying that age alone makes someone a bad driver or a bad conductor. There are mature, responsible 22-year-olds, just as there are reckless 40-year-olds. But when I think about the kind of judgement required to be trusted with the lives of children — every single day, for hours at a time, in heavy traffic, under pressure from passengers and from the need to make money — I cannot help but wonder whether 22 years is old enough to have developed that judgement. At 22, how many years of real driving experience can a person realistically have? How many years of experience dealing with the chaos of urban transport, the impatience of passengers, and the temptation to cut corners to save time or money? These are not small things. These are the very things that, when handled badly, can cost lives, as we have so painfully seen this week.

I am not writing this to attack young drivers as a group, because I know that for many young people, driving a kombi is one of the few ways available to them to earn a living in an economy that has not been kind to the youth. But surely, when the cargo is not goods or produce, but the children of this nation, the bar for who is allowed behind the wheel and who is allowed to be responsible for what goes into that vehicle, should be set higher.

A parent who hands their child over to a kombi every morning is placing an enormous amount of trust in two strangers: the driver and the conductor. That trust deserves to be backed by more than just a driver's licence and a willingness to work. It deserves experience, training and a demonstrated sense of responsibility that simply takes time to build.

Beyond the question of age and experience, this tragedy also forces us to confront something that has become almost normal on Zimbabwean roads: the casual way in which dangerous practices are allowed to continue simply because nobody has stopped them yet. How many kombis on our roads today are carrying things they should never be carrying, simply because nobody has checked and nobody has enforced the rules that already exist? Carrying a jerry can of petrol in a passenger vehicle is not a grey area. It is dangerous, it is reckless and frankly, it should never happen. Yet clearly, somewhere along the line, this became something that felt normal enough to do, even with children on board. That tells us that enforcement of basic safety standards in our public transport sector has broken down so badly that even the most obvious dangers are being ignored.

So what can be done? I do not pretend to have all the answers, but I believe there are concrete steps that the Transport ministry, together with the Zimbabwe Republic Police and other relevant authorities, can take to make sure that what happened in Gweru last week never happens again.

The first step should be a serious review of the minimum age and experience requirements for anyone who wants to operate public service vehicles, especially those used to transport schoolchildren. If the law allows someone as young as 18 to be a conductor and someone in their early twenties to drive a kombi full of passengers, then perhaps it is time to ask whether those limits are appropriate, particularly for routes that primarily serve schools. A higher minimum age, combined with a requirement for a certain number of years of general driving experience before someone can be licensed to operate vehicles used for school transport, would not be an unreasonable ask.

Second, there needs to be mandatory, regular training for all public transport crews, not just on how to drive, but on basic safety practices, including what can and cannot be carried in a passenger vehicle. A simple, repeated message that fuel containers must never be transported in a vehicle carrying passengers, especially children, should be drilled into every driver and conductor as a non-negotiable rule, with serious and immediate consequences for anyone caught breaking it.

Third, there needs to be a dedicated effort to identify and register vehicles that are routinely used to transport schoolchildren, so that these vehicles can be subjected to more frequent and more thorough safety inspections than ordinary commuter omnibuses. A vehicle that carries 40 children to and from school every single day should not be inspected with the same casual frequency as a vehicle that carries adults on an irregular basis. Schools themselves could play a role here by working with parents and transport associations to identify which vehicles their pupils use and reporting any vehicle that does not meet basic safety standards.

Fourth, there needs to be visible, consistent enforcement on our roads, not just sporadic blitzes that disappear after a few weeks. Roadblocks and spot checks that specifically look for unsafe practices, such as the carrying of fuel containers, overloading and the use of unroadworthy vehicles, need to become a permanent feature of how our traffic police operate, particularly on routes near schools and during the times when children are travelling.

Fifth, there is a role for communities and parents too. Where possible, parents in a given area should try to organise themselves to know which kombis and which crews are transporting their children and to raise concern collectively when something does not feel right. A driver who is known to be reckless or a conductor who is known to behave dangerously, should not continue working on that route simply because individual parents felt powerless to complain. There is strength in numbers and school communities working together can apply pressure that individual voices cannot.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there needs to be accountability that goes beyond the individuals arrested. Yes, the driver and conductor have been arrested for culpable homicide, and if they are found to have acted negligently, they must face the consequences of the law. But we must also ask harder questions about the operators who own these vehicles, the associations that are supposed to regulate them and the authorities who are supposed to be inspecting them. If the systems meant to prevent this kind of tragedy were working properly, would a conductor have felt free to board a kombi full of schoolchildren carrying nine litres of petrol? Until we are willing to look at the whole system and not just the two young people who were behind the wheel and at the door that day, we will keep having this same conversation after the next tragedy, and the one after that.

Seven families in Gweru are left to mourn children they sent off to school on an ordinary Wednesday morning, expecting to see them again that evening. Nothing written in this column, and nothing the Transport ministry does from this point onwards, can bring the children back. But if their deaths can become the reason why our public transport system finally takes child safety seriously, then perhaps something good can still come out of this terrible loss. We owe them and every other child who boards a kombi tomorrow morning, at least that much.

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