WHAT is annoying about our frequent bus accidents and the resultant deaths of innocent souls is that most of them are avoidable.
The most recent one in which eight Anglican pilgrims from Bernard Mizeki Shrine in Marondera were burned to death inside an unroadworthy bus is a typical example.
How this defective bus could travel all the way from Mutasa District in Manicaland to Marondera in Mashonaland East is where the problem lies.
Our roads always have a visible police presence who are paid to check the roadworthiness of buses, among other vehicular traffic.
Here is a bus already on its return journey, packed with pilgrims, but without a certificate of fitness and no one detects it.
The bus owner obviously knew about it, but it appears what mattered most to him was the cash he was paid for hiring out a defective bus.
To him, passenger safety was secondary.
The driver, because of a desire to keep his job, routinely took the bus without bothering about its condition.
This is why we have law-enforcement agents on our roads.
We can safely assume this was not the only unroadworthy bus on our roads that day or any other day for that matter.
But why is this so?
Obviously, if our Vehicle Inspection Department (VID) was strict in ensuring all buses on our roads had valid certificates of fitness, this tragedy might not have have happened.
And it looks like it is not only Passion Link Coaches that pays lip service to fitness certificates for their buses.
Why should they and even others, if there is no-one to enforce the law?
We are used to seeing buses being stopped along the roads by police.
And, according to the grapevine, the police are only interested in having their palms ‘greased’ in order for them to look the other way.
They are said to be never concerned about compliance with laid-down regulations!
We are bound to believe these stories and if they are indeed true, such corruption should never be tolerated.
To put personal gain ahead of human life is tantamount to supping with the devil.
Regulations to ensure passenger safety are there in black and white and so are mechanisms to ensure they are observed.
What is lacking is a foolproof mechanism to ensure that those entrusted to perform their tasks are, in fact, doing so.
For instance, police assigned to check vehicles along the routes plied by this Passion Link Coaches bus must be held accountable .
How was this unroadworthy killer bus allowed to cross provincial boundaries without being impounded?
However, the police should not be be singled out for blame in this horrendous accident.
No doubt, the chief culprit should be the bus owner, whose conscience should be hurting for the avoidable loss of life of these pilgrims.
Losing the bus licence alone is not enough.
If prosecution can lead to a jail term as well, this might act as a deterrent to like- minded bus owners.
The driver is no saint either.
He should have made sure the bus had a certificate of fitness, before he took off, for failure to do so amounted to gross negligence.
If he was the regular driver of this particular bus, he must have been aware of the faults that are said to have developed along the way.
He cannot get away scot-free.
The Passion Link Coaches mechanic responsible for letting this fault-riddled bus out of the depot also has a case to answer.
For the passengers to remain seated quietly, without protest, in a bus visibly faulty is not acceptable, either.
It is the passengers’ right to make sure their mode of transport is safe and when they suspect something is wrong nothing should stop them from asking to see the fitness certificate.
So there is a long chain of stakeholders who include, the VID, owner, driver, mechanic, police and passengers, that could have helped stop this accident from happening.
