Bus drivers under fire these past holidays

The several accidents and other incidents involving buses these past holidays only helped to fuel the anger in many Batswana over the behavior of bus drivers – during the holidays and in the past. Already facebook is flooded with posts of people recommending various forms of action against careless and irresponsible bus drivers, saying the authorities seem to be turning a blind eye to the ticking bomb that these drivers are. Gatwe most of them bet over people’s lives, ba ipoka on how much time they would be taking to arrive at their various destinations. Others are said to be plain inexperienced while bus owners are also being blamed for burning out their drivers who have little time to rest. Now people want to know where else to run to as they have been trusting buses to be the safest mode of travel. Already they are calling for the return of the train as they feel they can no longer get into a bus without thinking of what has been happening lately. In fact, many now want bus speeds to be regulated to nothing more than 100kilometres per hour, and to use point systems where each time a bus violates the set regulations, points are deducted until they are low enough to take away the owner’s public transport licence. They say that way, bus owners will start to care about how their drivers behave. It remains to be seen if any authorities would even consider this. “If Botswana Police Service see the need to have a helicopter as part of their response strategy in combating crime why can’t the ministry of health buy its own air ambulances especially that Botswana has higher number of road accidents and have poor road infrastructure which doesn’t help when responding to emergency incidents? Don’t we think air ambulances will save many lives lost via road accidents and also speed up emergency services response time to accidents and other accidents where health care is in imminent need? Hon Edwin G Dikoloti madi a mokgokolosa a dule a ko lephata la gago le reke air ambulance.” Velly Best Mpopelang