With a fatal kombi crash almost every four weeks, the latest when seven people were killed in Kuwadzana, Harare, last week when a kombi driver allegedly turned right in front of a fuel tanker, has once again brought up demands for action.
Social media exaggerates that many kombi drivers are drug addicts and that kombis are involved in a majority of fatal accidents.
While more people are killed in accidents involving private vehicles, there is that extra dimension that a bad private driver might just kill themselves and their family or friends, a bad kombi driver automatically kills total strangers, the passengers aboard the kombi.
And people using public transport are entitled to safe journeys and proper care and consideration.
Some car owners suggest, once again, banning kombis, but this totally misses the point and is about as useful as suggesting a ban on luxury SUVs every time one of them is involved in an accident.
Kombis do not kill: it is kombi drivers who cause the accidents that result in deaths. So the action that must be taken is to bring the drivers under control.
This will require, almost certainly, a complete re-organisation and complete reset of how the kombi industry works, while the police can, and must, do more to bring cowboy drivers within the law, the kombi owners must also be involved and be made to take responsibility. Every kombi is basically a dual business. The vehicle owner buys a kombi to generate an income and is responsible for the mechanical soundness, the maintenance, the tyres, the vehicle checks and the batch of licencing and insurance. But the owner does not run the kombi operations.
The driver rents the kombi by the day for a fixed fee. The route is fixed by the particular operational licence, and the owner has to ensure that the driver is properly licenced and has the public service medical and other tests.
The driver has to buy the fuel, pay the conductor and any charges, legal or tout generated, at terminuses and, critically when we come to control measures, pay driving fines and operating fines, that is operating off the approved route or stopping where that is not permitted. The owner would pay the fines for vehicle defects. The problems largely arise from that fixed daily fee. The driver does not even cover the basic rent until quite a number of trips have been made and the profit only comes late in the day, even for a busy driver.
The driver also has to make assessments of traffic in both directions. For example, in the early morning and late afternoon, drivers will travel in one direction almost empty and need to try and make two trips in the full direction.
The pressure is on the driver to make as many trips as possible with as many passengers as possible in a very competitive business and that leads to the risk taking and breaches of the laws and by-laws. Kombi drivers tend to be very skilled as drivers, and could not indulge in the sort of risky behaviour they do unless they were skilled. The problem is that they do not follow the law and the Highway Code.
The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development last year and this year made a major change in the bus industry and created a new culture by forcing bus owners to take responsibility.
Bus companies saw their licences suspended if drivers broke the law and regulations, and were thus forced to take action, rather than just blame the driver and hope for the best.
Even the requirement to install speed limiters and monitors was to force owners to police their own operations. Bus drivers are on salary, not commission.
The same concept, of making kombi owners take responsibility to ensure they take control, would seem to be the logical extension of this Ministerial policy, especially as it has been successful.
For a start, this would require operators to put drivers on salary, as an employee, along with their own safeguards to ensure that all fares collected were handed in, so trusted drivers would be needed.
Zambian kombi drivers have always been employees, so the system can work, and Lusaka roads as a result are a lot more orderly.
The actual income will be roughly the same. Outside the morning and late afternoon peak periods, kombis spend a lot of time queuing at the terminuses and ranks waiting for enough passengers to make the next trip worthwhile.
So regardless of whether the driver weaves in and out of traffic and cuts across traffic, or whether they go with the flow and follow the law, they will make roughly the same number of trips, just seeing fewer kombis stacked in each queue waiting for their turn at terminuses.
The successful owners associations that have started bringing order to the business, since there is a code of conduct that owners have to follow, could be the starting point for more integrated operations and also build up databases on drivers and be able to show who were the best in both respects, driving ability and following the law.
The police could also build up their action against kombis. We regret that corruption has been bad in the past but the present efforts by the police to curb that menace should allow a more effective enforcement of road law.
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At the same time, we do need to upgrade the public transport systems. Those who like to urge a kombi ban should stop and think what their own car trips would be like if for every kombi there were a minimum of 40 more cars on the road, and that would be a low estimate and would include the double kombi journeys that many passengers have to use.
As Zimbabwe becomes better off and car ownership rises we need to offer a sensible alternative to using a car for routine trips like going to and from work. That is possible since many European and British senior executives go by train and bus leaving their cars at home since that is quicker and easier and misses the traffic jams and lack of parking.
But it does require something a bit better than a cramped kombi driven by a cowboy and owners who like the idea of staying in business need to start thinking about how to upgrade the vehicles and bring the drivers and conductors under control so they can compete.
Good business, enforcement and making owners be responsible can all tame the public transport jungle.
