Experts caution govt on removing speed humps

Arusha. Mr Casmir Moshi, the manager of Lucky Vincent School in Arusha, was busy but looking forward for a successful trip of his pupils that Saturday morning.

It was on May 6 this year when three minibuses with nearly 100 pupils took off for Karatu for a tour of a sister school.

Mr Moshi had to ensure the logistics were in place. By 7 am the joyful pupils had boarded the vehicles ready for the trip.

Mr Moshi himself did not travel. He was overseeing other matters at the school. After all, the trip was only for the finalist Standard Seven pupils.

It was between 10am to 11am that he got a shocking phone call that the very pupils he had escorted to for the trip had been involved in a fatal crash.

The minibus they were travelling in skidded off the road and plunged into a ravine at Rhotia hill near Karatu, killing 35 of its 38 occupants.

More information about the tragedy continued to stream in. If he and others had imagined it was a normal accident, they were wrong. It was a horrific one!

Nearly a bus full of the young learners had been crashed to death. No sooner, parents and multitudes of other people stormed the academy. The entire Arusha City was thrown into mourning.

The tragedy was one of the sad moments for Arusha during 2017. It left harrowing memory of the leaders of tomorrow whose lives were cut short in a cruel manner.

Women wept uncontrollably as police and local leaders tried to control them. One of them was Mama Arnold who literally collapsed. She lost her son.

The deaths led to renewed calls to enforce traffic rules, especially those involving school transport.

Some engineers implored the government to rethink of its recently announced measure to remove speed humps on grounds it was one of the options to reduce road carnage.

“Speed humps should remain because they are primarily devised for speed control. But they should not be everywhere,” said Institution of Engineers Tanzania president Ngwisa Mpembe.

He wonders why the Rhotia hill slope towards Karatu where the tragedy occurred did not have the necessary warning signs and the road humps to control speed although known to be a dangerous area for motorists.

“The fact that such a dangerous road section did not have standardised warning signs to caution drivers, means the tragedy has an engineering element calling for an engineering solution to avert such disasters in future”, he told The Citizen.

He suggests road humps should continue stay because for Tanzania they have been devised to control the speed of vehicles “after failing in other options”.

He said the engineering fraternity had been saddened by the death of innocent schoolchildren and called on the government to regulate the movement of pupils to avert a likelihood of such any disaster.

Moshi resident Hecton Chuwa said it was pity that some the school vehicles were driven by young drivers with questionable skills who have not even attended the required training. He suggested that drivers of the school buses should always have assistants who would assist them to oversee the safety of pupils.

He cited a recent case in Moshi where a pupil fell out of the vehicle while the driver was speeding.

Others appealed to school owners to ensure they send their school buses to recognised garages for servicing to ensure that they were in perfect order and safe for the passengers. Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who came to Arusha to lead the nation to bid farewell to fallen pupils said the road disaster in Karatu was a wake-up call to deal firmly with reckless driving.

She said careless or drunk driving were among the major causes of road fatalities in Tanzania which, she explained, continue to claim lives of innocent people.

“Drivers should be careful when driving on the roads and should avoid drunk driving,” she said, regretting absence of crucial road signs on many roads.