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Felex Share Senior Reporter
Government, through the inter-ministerial committee on disaster management, is crafting a cocktail of radical measures to deal with errors and faults causing road accidents. Speaking after Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister Joel Biggie Matiza said drastic measures were needed to deal with negligence, disregard of traffic regulations and laxity in law enforcement.

This comes after over 80 people recently perished within 10 days in two separate road accidents in Manicaland and Matabeleland South provinces.

“As Government, we are taking up steps to stop this carnage on our roads,” Minister Matiza said.

“We are going to meet as an inter-ministerial committee on disaster management led by Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing (July Moyo) and all stakeholders involved to see that we deal with this issue in terms of, among other things, enforcement, education and technology.

“These are some of the things we are going to start applying and we are taking it seriously because the number of deaths that are coming out of our roads are increasing by the day. This is mainly due to negligence, not abiding by the law and laxity in enforcement.

“We are going to address this in a short time to come and will announce the raft of measures that we want to take. These will be radical because we cannot keep on having people dying on our roads.

Minister Moyo said Government was doing all it could to ensure DNA profiling to identify victims of the accident that occurred near West Nicholson was completed.

The bus accident claimed 32 lives and some of the victims were burnt beyond recognition after an explosion.

The explosion is suspected to have been caused by a gas cylinder. “It has been painstaking work since Friday (last week),” Minister Moyo said.

“We invited all families so that pathologists can take blood samples of the relatives, mostly children and mothers.

“By Sunday, all the blood samples had been taken by the pathologists, fortunately the bodies were identifiable only to the extent that you knew this is a separate body from the other. It’s not ashes per say.

“NUST is promising us and we are hoping that they can do it within two weeks from Sunday. We addressed the families to tell them that this is the process that we have to go through and I must say the pathologist was impressed by the understanding shown by the families.” Minister Moyo said Government would continue assisting the affected families until they buried their beloved ones.