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The two vehicles, a Honda CRV and Nissan Caravan are engulfed in flames on impact at the 60km peg along Mvurwi-Centenary Road on Monday

Zimbabwe lost another 11 innocent lives in a road traffic accident on the road to Mvurwi, Mashonaland Central Province, on Monday afternoon.

Some media houses didn’t even bother to report on the tragedy, which was blamed on human error. Another day, another accident, another death. Life moves on for the living.

Preliminary police investigations revealed two things: that the Nissan Caravan was overloaded, with 21 people instead of the legal limit of 18 passengers. The two vehicles were apparently speeding, which could partly explain why they exploded into an inferno on collision. The dead were said to have been burnt beyond recognition.

Monday’s tragedy couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Zimbabwe Republic Police, compounded by the fact that the commuter omnibus was overloaded, given also the fact that there are often so many roadblocks on our national roads that driving has become a dreadful chore.

Last week, the police protested bitterly when this paper published a story which indicated a spike in road traffic accidents across the country. The figures were taken from the Zimstat website, which attributed them to Police General Headquarters. The police vehemently denied the story and the figures, forcing Zimstat to apologise for displaying “false” information.

The latest accident raises questions about us as a nation. First is the cavalier attitude exhibited by the media, itself a poor reflection of society though. The tragedy was treated as a non-event. We have become inured to accidents and death that we have ceased to care how many die, unless an immediate family member is involved. That is when death pricks our conscience. That’s a very sad development.

Second, we don’t know what it will take for our drivers to take human life seriously. Once they get behind the wheel they seem to get possessed by a speed demon where human life ceases to matter. The recent accident along the Harare-Chirundu highway where a King Lion bus killed 43 passengers near Makuti was also blamed on human error: a familiar euphemism for speeding, or simply, reckless driving.

Since the King Lion bus tragedy, there have been calls for Government to ban night driving. Because the accident happened at night. That’s how emotional we can be as a nation when an accident occurs. But also implied in those calls was a feeling that drivers need to be closely monitored by the police for them to do their duty properly and safely.

That argument is debunked by Monday’s accident in which 11 people were killed while several others were badly injured. It happened in the afternoon. We cannot speculate on how many roadblocks or spot-checks the commuter omnibus had passed through on its ill-fated journey. But why was it allowed to pass with its oversize cargo?

The simple answer is that some police officer somewhere is eating blood money. Somebody paid for safe passage, and the vehicle was allowed to go.

We know the police were furious with our story on road traffic accidents last week because we suggested that the many roadblocks on our national highways did not justify their presence. It was implied that most of them were there to make money, and this is a view shared by a majority of Zimbabweans, including the bad drivers who cause death.

May we suggest, therefore, that seeing as the many roadblocks have done little to tame the road traffic jungle; that the police reduce the number of roadblocks to the barest minimum required to curb crime, and instead deploy more patrol officers to deal with speeding drivers.

Laying ambushes behind clumps of trees or near curves on the road is not solving the problem of road carnage, nor do the inconvenient, predictable roadblocks, whose purpose has been reduced to extorting cash from motorists.

While highway patrols won’t necessarily stop the scourge of corruption and extortion, at least they won’t be as predictable by way of location. Even the rogue driver will exercise caution, reduce human error and save lives. We can’t afford to get used to death.