Road accidents and the sanctity of Life

The year began in a most dispirited manner as death struck again some ten kilometers out of Bafia on the Yaounde-Bafoussam national road in an unending spiral of killings on the nation’s highways which seems to defy all governmental initiatives to keep our roads a bit safer.

Human factors and the hackneyed blames on the state of the highway, as usual, will be blamed for this excessive bloodletting which, this time, took an unprecedented 19 lives among whom were some freshly-graduated servicemen eagerly heading for their villages to present their graduating certificates to their parents and other loved ones.

What a tragedy! Even innocent nursing babies were killed. The young student gendarmes who graduated just last week were actually given a brief 15-day permission to visit their families after a two-year intense training period before taking up their postings. Now, they will neither meet these loved ones nor ever be present to serve and defend the fatherland as they had anticipated. Who knows what the babies and the other youthful dead would have grown up to be?  As the commiseration over these deaths continues, it is time to ask some useful questions surrounding the Bafia accident.

A senior official of the ministry of Transport present at the accident site, is said to have revealed that the bus driver had done several rounds between Yaounde and a number of cities in the West Region requiring him rather to be taking a deserved rest at the time of the accident and, in so doing, stretching human capability beyond reasonable limits. Reporters on the scene of the accident also observed that as road security agents tried the best they could to extract the dead and wounded from the carcass, officials of the transport company whose bus was involved in the accident were rather surreptitiously trying to obliterate the company name on the bus in wanton neglect of what was the most urgent at that time: attending to the wounded or trying to save lives.

Many relatives arriving at the scene of the accident also noticed that within a few hours of the accident, the carcass had been removed, not necessary to ease the flow of traffic, but ostensibly to leave no sign about the company’s involvement in the accident. This is not new. In countless cases, the Ministry of Transport has taken disciplinary action against erring public transport companies, leading even up to suspension. But many of such companies circumvent the measure by simply registering new company names and running the same buses with disarming impunity.

That the bus owners adopt this attitude is enough to say they absolutely have no remorse even in the face of a hecatomb in the likes of what occurred near Bafia; otherwise they will not put a driver on unending rounds without rest and will not show so much dispatch in cleaning off their corporate name from the bus wreckage or clear the carcass with the same expedition. Taking these nippy measures by the company owners is clear about their concern for their corporate image and the need to continue to make money and shows, rather clearly, that their focus is on making money.

But someone somewhere must be able to remind these heartless capitalists of the sanctity of human life and that if humans constitute useful capital on which they make their money because if there are no human beings, the buses will never be full anyway! The need to project the sanctity of human life is essential in any road safety strategy and government, as well as trade unions of the transport sector and other stakeholders are being summoned before their responsibilities of holding these transport companies to account in the respect of human lives.