Police must not give up on bodaboda madness

Running a motorcycle taxi, popularly known as bodaboda, is a low start-up capital enterprise seen as a blessing for Tanzania’s growing army of working age youth.

With just around Sh2 million shillings, the investor earn up to Sh10,000 a day while the rider he employs , depending on his aggressiveness, can earn anything from Sh10,000 to Sh30,000. That is a tidy sum for a young primary school leaver in a country where the statutory minimum salary is Sh315,000. That is why it is easy conjure the idea of bodaboda millionaire!

Given the poor quality of Tanzanian roads, hiring a bodaboda makes a lot of sense instead of boarding a daladala during the rush hours. A bodaboda’s capacity to snake its way around the tortuous traffic jams means the passenger saves time which, as the English say, is money. Furthermore, manoeuvrability enables it to access areas that are out of reach by motorcars in semi-urban areas, which means they expedite the country’s economy growth in ways that the daladala cannot.

However, the good story ends there, for the bodabodas have transformed themselves into killer machines as everybody, include the police force, watches helplessly. Records from virtually all hospitals show a huge majority of patients in orthopaedic wings are mostly victims of bodaboda crashes.

Police reports indicate that each day, out of every 17 Tanzanians, three are killed in accidents involving bodabodas. Furthermore, say the police, over the past five years, this transport system has been the cause of 5,518 deaths from a total of 28,341 reported accidents.

Needless to say, these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, for many of the accidents which don’t cause someone’s death, serious injuries or when there is no police officer on sight, go unreported.

Reducing unemployment

Which is to say, even as the bodabodas are praised for speeding up the economy, reducing unemployment and making a few people rich, the machines are pushing the country back by killing and maiming thousands of our people.

There has actually been concern on whether, on the overall, the cost of carrying out surgeries to mend broken limbs doesn’t eat up all the benefits accrued from the booming bodaboda business.

But, we need to ask: why should the motorcycle taxis be the cause of so much sorrow to Tanzanian families when they shouldn’t? The motorbike, handled with care and sobriety, need not be the killing machine it has become.

It ought to have been a blessing to the economy, but a look at the numbers of those who die and those who end up with injuries that render them disabled are making people have a second thought. There have even been calls to ban this mode of transport!

That, of course, would be an extreme measure, for we still believe the youth who operate the generally useful machine can be made to stop their suicidal recklessness. It appears like our overworked traffic officers are giving up on the riders—we urge them not to.

The police force should instead consider setting up a special unit to deal with the bodaboda riders and inject sanity into them, for clearly, many seem to put little or no value on their own lives and lives of their passengers and other road users.