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Botswana: Etcetera II - Going The Wrong Way
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Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)
17 March 2008
Posted to the web 17 March 2008
Sandy Grant
When the southward moving traffic suddenly slowed down to 60 kph last week as it passed Gaborone North, I assumed that a driver up front had spotted the cops encamped at the Glen Valley turn off. The problem proved to be much less routine.
Parked bang in the middle of our side of the road was a car whose driver must have been shocked out of his wits to discover that he had somehow got himself on the wrong side and was driving against the traffic, instead of with it. Road designers and traffic planners can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate that any driver could make such a mistake and for having omitted to take the necessary steps to ensure that it couldn't happen.
On the other hand, there are eventualities that can be spotted a mile off by almost anyone and steps taken by those in authority to reduce or eliminate the possibility of disaster. I refer to the trucks which carry, and deliver, standard cement bricks which are sometimes packaged in plastic and sometimes tied with metal strips. I have long assumed that one day those bricks would slip and crash onto a vehicle driving either beside that truck or directly behind it. The assumption, were this to happen, has always been that the occupants of the innocent vehicle would be instantly killed or horribly injured and that the accident would be compounded as the vehicles behind piled into each other.
Over the past year or so, I have cautiously driven behind some of these tilting trucks noting how precarious has been their load. I have seen 'bound' packages with slippage - cement bricks that had already fallen by the way side - suggesting that a few miles down the road, when a few more were gone, the whole lot would fall apart. When the relevant authorities moved smartly in on those heavy haulage trucks and insisted that their loads of sand and/or stone must be covered - for which we all owe them our thanks - I assumed that their next step would have been to regulate the cement brick haulers. It hasn't happened. But it must. I have now witnessed what I have long feared - a truck losing many of its cement bricks as it tried to negotiate a Gaborone circle. Mercifully, it seemed that there was no other vehicle nearby when the 'accident' occurred.
But from the point of view of the police, was such an occurrence an 'accident' when there was no other vehicle involved, when no one was hurt, nothing hit against anything else and when there could be no insurance claim? Did they alert those authorities who are also responsible or did they feel that it was better to wait until something really serious happened?
Because it will. But it isn't only our own local authorities who sometimes need to be urged into action. Take the Kazungula Bridge over the Zambezi. How come that a single individual, Cecil Rhodes, could do the job when, a hundred years later, a collective of countries is seemingly incapable of following up on his Cape to Cairo vision (not such a bad one as visions go!) because one of the three countries involved, being incapable of sharing that vision, is yet again slowing things down.
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How many years have already been lost on this project because of obstructive bureaucracy and sheer incompetence? How hugely have the anticipated costs risen in those wasted years? That one project could long ago have transformed the economic situation of much of Southern Africa. Instead its collective leadership and institutional organisations such as SADC have proved incapable of dealing with the blockage and with overcoming other problems that were inevitably involved. It's a sad, sorry record. Zimbabwe is making Southern Africa pay a very heavy cost.
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| Copyright © 2008 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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