When a highway is manace

| Friday September 17, 2010 00:00

KUMAKWANE: The year was 1990 when the first Murray and Roberts earth movers rolled into the village and with it the hope of transforming life in what was a little developed village. For two years, pupils from the only primary school and their parents would set aside their tasks and converge on the construction site to watch the plant operators and their earth-moving machines at work day and night.

In a country of exceptionally lax labour laws, many of the plant operators and labourers spoke in clicks - not the Sesarwa variety that is fairly easy on the palate, but a harsher, rapid-fire version that puts the tongue through acrobatics. The men who were building the A10 Highway to connect Gaborone and Kanye were Xhosas and Zulus from South Africa. Predictably, camp followers from the village came to make the men of 'Ko Mmari' feel at home. Today, the women's brothers are burdened with a crop of nephews and nieces who form a living testimony to that episode of development. 

It also spawned a song by renowned folk musician, Stampore, who complains about this litter left behind by the migrants in the villages of Mogoditshane, Gabane, Kumakwane, Thamaga and Moshupa that lie along the highway.The lyrics of the song go like this:

 Mmari o re tlogeletse bo-Mmarinyana wee. Re a sokola ditsala tsame, re a sokola. Fa o tsena Kumakwane o fitlhela bo-Mmarinyana. O leba kwa Gabane o gabalala, o fitlhela bo-Mmarinyana ...

But the road whose construction generated ill-begotten children is now claming many lives. Indiscriminately. So far this year, Thamaga police have recorded a total of 14 fatalities and 15 accidents with serious injuries on the Gaborone-Kanye Highway. No less than 36 deaths have occurred on internal roads in Kumakwane and Thamaga since 2004, mainly males aged between six and 60. In addition to untimely deaths, the Gaborone-Kanye Highway is characterised by over-speeding, heavy-laden trucks and abandoned wrecks from previous accidents. During rush hours, the road becomes a badly designed racecourse as motorists attempt to outperform Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonzo, Louis Hamilton and Botswana's own Atang Makgekgenene. As this happens, pupils must find their way across the bedlam and mayhem in which donkey carts also do battle, as must everyone else, including the old and infirm.But why not at least have a few speed humps to slow down the madness a little? Forget it, comes the lucid answer from the authorities, it is a highway and there can be no humps on a highway!

Former MP for Kweneng South (under which Kumakwane falls), Gladys Kokorwe, was not very vocal about this damnable road, even though a man was run over by a car as she addressed a political rally a mere 100 metres away in the run-up to the 2004 general elections. A story doing the rounds afterwards was that when people attending her rally rushed off to the scene of the accident, Kokorwe actually hollered into the PA system to bid them back!    Even her own car was once involved in an accident along this road when the driver stopped for children at a Zebra crossing. During innumerable kgotla meetings she addressed in the village, the issue of the road was raised, but the MP's answer was always to the effect that there could be no speed humps on a highway because that would contravene SADC regulations. 'Teach your children how to cross the road,' Kokorwe would conclude. People say their MP was more vocal on women's issues. At the beginning of 2008, she sponsored a private member's bill on domestic violence. By the end of that year, it was passed into law. It is difficult to understand why she never saw a need to bring similar animation to the Road Transport Act.

One evening in July 2006, a long-haul truck lunged into a house less than 100 meters from the highway as a man who had just arrived home from work watched tv. The cab smashed through the sitting room into a bedroom as the truck jack-knifed, bringing half of the trailer into the house. The man was instantly killed. The driver survived and said he lost control.

In 2007, riots broke out after a speeding motorist hit a man on the same highway, killing him on the spot. The scene turned ugly when eyewitnesses began to stone any vehicle that passed by, resulting in a kilometre-long traffic congestion. The police subsequently arrived and arrested people indiscriminately. 'Ke ne ka laela basimane bame go re ba letse monoso fa seemo se pala,' Superintendent Andrew Bosilong, then stationed at Thamaga Police Station, would later tell Mmegi. At least 15 people spent five days crammed in police cells before the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. 

A number of Kumakwane youths formed themselves into an ad hoc civic action group and approached the then Minister of Works and Transport, Lesego Motsumi, who agreed that the road was a menace and promised to act. Various churches have sought divine intervention by holding prayer meetings along the road.

President Ian Khama, then Vice President, visited the village briefly towards the end of 2007 and also 'assured' the residents that government would do something about the matter. But that was not before he had displayed a blas attitude of his own; ''Le lona a ko lo tswalele bana ba lona mo dijarateng, ba seka ba ya ko tseleng,' he said. Other than more deaths and more accidents, nothing happened.

There is a new refrain now in Kumakwane. It is a refrain of desperation. 'We need to do something,' everyone says. 'We must take the law into our own hands and build speed humps ourselves.' People say this to one another in church, in bars and at funerals when they bury the latest statistic of the Gaborone-Kanye Highway. This is because the police say they are also at their wits' end because speed traps only reduce the problem temporarily. 

The VDC is not helping the situation much by withholding its support from the youth ad hoc group purportedly because the group has not reached out to youth in the four corners of Kumakwane. 'When you raise a complaint or make any suggestion, it is immediately classified as political manoeuvre by one faction or other,' says a member who prefers anonymity. The local authorities, among them the headman and the councillor, are just as helpless as the people they lead. 'Something needs to be done,' they say every time another victim is buried. 

So despondent are people that they do not know how much faith to place in the Reverend Dr John Seakgosing, who is the Minister of Health. Just last weekend, he promised mourners at the funeral of the latest victim that the government will build speed humps along the road afterall! The deceased was trying to cross the road on her way to a funeral when she was run over by a speeding motorist. The man from Serowe attempted to flee but was arrested several kilometres from the scene by other motorists who had witnessed the incident.

Though he did not state any timeframe, Seakgosing said he had discussed the problem with his counterpart in the Ministry of Works and Transport and that the latter had promised to erect speed humps on the road. '

Twenty years after the machiney that held the villagers spellbound has left, development projects are evident, the population has more than doubled, and death has become a part of life in Kumakwane, thanks to the highway.

Perhaps Seakgosing's promise will be fulfilled and the lives of bo-Mmarinyana and everyone else here will be saved.