By Isaac Massaquoi
Please excuse my ignorance. I cannot see or feel anything to suggest that the country is indeed responding to the grim reality that we are losing an unprecedented number of lives on our roads every year. The situation is very serious but it appears as if we are all hanging in there probably saying, as is common here, that it's all the work of God. Religion teaches us that. I am a very religious man but I am convinced that we haven't done anything well thought-out, concerted and strategic to drastically reduce road accidents and save the lives of many Sierra Leoneans who continue to perish.
I say we, because, even journalists like us have not helped the situation. We write about such incidents only when they happen closer to home or when there is heavy loss of life; some politicians prefer to score popularity points out of such incidents instead of taking strong action to prevent them in the first place; the police and road transport authority personnel are not at all convincing with all they tell us they are doing; and the whole nation does not really shout loud enough to force politicians to act. Public outcry has at best always been sporadic, disjointed and peppered with cheap politics. The story of Sierra Leone is never complete without the mention of how we have allowed politics to interfere with relationships and even food.
So true to form, I am here crying about the number of people dying on our roads for many reasons, but the immediate one is that one of the foremost broadcast technicians in Sierra Leone has just been buried, along with his son and two of his colleagues after a road accident in the south of the country. I will return to the story of Gassimu Kaifala soon.
For now I am here writing this piece today just because in January, I was lucky to miraculously survive a very serious accident just outside Makeni on my way to my cousin's wedding on Kono. Believe me, it was a miracle. Please bear with me if you are not very religious because I also credit the survival of five of us on that vehicle to the glory of God. I will spare you the details. Now back to Gas Pee, as we fondly called him.
My last encounter with him was not too long ago when the transmitter at Radio Mount Aureol went down. Our resident technician was out of the country on holiday at the time. We struggled to repair the equipment and for more than a week the station was off air. Technicians came and went. Then we were led to Gas Pee's modest workshop. From the moment I saw him I knew the solution to our problem had been found. This is no exaggeration. Within a few hours, we were doing test transmission again. We argued over his charges later but the job was done. We had done several other projects before and he was fantastic.
I am sure many radio managers in Sierra Leone have similar stories about Gas Pee. This is the man we've lost. He didn't get any national honours and his face didn't get onto the obituary pages of any newspaper, but the broadcasters who travelled to Kenema to pay their respects did enough to make the late man's family proud. His death has opened up a huge gap into which many a community radio station would fall for lack of professional maintenance of studio and field equipment. I hope the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists would recognise him at their Annual General Meeting, due soon.
To keep in touch with the broad theme of this piece which is road safety, or the lack of it, I have to mention the death and destruction that visited other Sierra Leoneans who were returning from some business trip somewhere in the north. The figures of dead and injured conflicted - that must be expected since the story first broke on the notoriously unreliable social media but at least 10 people had died in that incident. If that did not jolt us into serious action, I doubt what else would.
You will probably notice that I am resisting the temptation to try and provide answers to the question: why are there so many accidents and deaths on our roads? And, at least many of our trunk roads are good by our own standards. I don't know the correct answer but I have heard experts talk a lot about issues ranging from the quality of the vehicles that come into this country and indeed the roads themselves.
In the United States, we hear stories of how well established Japanese car makers, like Toyota and Suzuki are made to recall tens of thousands of cars because of manufacturer's faults like defective brake lights. Try that in Sierra Leone, the car makers will simply put a public relations machinery in place and I bet some in the media would risk hundreds of Sierra Leonean lives defending big business.
So there are many things we can do: we can have proper police patrols, not those EXTORTION POINTS that are now really getting on people's nerves. We can display proper road signs visible to everyone, we can end the corruption on our roads both from the point of drivers' unions, the police and their auxiliaries - traffic wardens. Some vehicles are clearly road unworthy but are kept running because of corruption and lack of monitoring capacity.
Almost all the vehicles plying the most dangerous routes in Freetown should have been taken off the road long before Ernest Bai Koroma became president. You can find them on the routes between Model Junction and Leicester Village, George Brook junction to the community itself and between Lumley and Goderich. The cars are bad, they are always completely overloaded and the drivers have no license to drive.
The authorities drive pass them daily without doing anything. What's all this talk about lawlessness then? There can never be a water-tight system in which the odd rogue driver is unable to cheat, we accept that, but this is so brazen that the police have no excuse not to have acted decisively to end the threat to the lives of the poorest of the poor who cannot afford to sit in a vehicle worth $ 65,000.
I don't wish to return to this issue any time soon after another needless death. Sleep on Gas Pee.
(C) Politico 20/05/14
