With help from his physiotherapist, Sabuta has been able to graduate from the wheelchair to walking frames. In order to drive, Sabuta decided to use rods connected to a metal plate to control his automatic car. He uses the rod to accelerate and brake.
“It was a major risk to me and other motorists so I decided that I needed to control the pedals from the steering wheel,” said the man, who has covered the long haul from Kasane to Gaborone using the rods. He said when the police stop him, he always explains to them his plight. “I have always explained to them that I need to survive. There is no one else who can help me but if they insist that I should not drive, perhaps I should stay with them in their homes.”
When he discovered that Motor Centre had to take the car to South Africa to install the controls for the brakes and accelerator, he contacted a certain Mpho Masire to find out if he could help.
“I knew he had once made a three wheeled vehicle for himself and when I contacted him about my predicament, he was more than willing to help me. It took him exactly three days to design this,” he said pointing to the brakes and accelerator controls connected to the steering wheel.
On the left hand, the iron rods are connected to the brake pedal and the right hand pedal is the accelerator.
“Masire made me go for a road test to the Tlokweng border and since it was fixed about three months ago, I have never had any problems,” Sabuta said. He insists that using his hands is much better than using legs. He was recently given a licence for the disabled with restrictions that he uses only the present automatic car and that he wears corrective lenses. The licence also states that he is physically disabled.
Sabuta, a Warrant Officer Class 2 at Botswana Defence Force (BDF), said that all he needs is to be able to go from one point to another and cannot afford to hire anyone to chauffeur him. “I was not born disabled, so I should not think of myself as such. I can do almost everything for myself from washing to ironing and cooking,” he said.
Sabuta was involved in an accident in June last year, when a truck he was driving overturned after a tyre burst, a few kilometres from Pandamatenga. One of the 95 soldiers he was transporting died while he suffered a spinal injury.
