The Sunday Mail
Towards the end of 2012 I was among Jomic members who visited Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa. The purpose of that visit was to study how these countries dealt with reconciliation and national reconstruction following protracted periods of political turmoil.
Kenya was then under a unity government almost similar to the one we had in Zimbabwe. Rwanda had experienced a genocide which claimed the lives of more than 800 000 in 100 days of bloodletting. South Africa was trying to create a post-apartheid “rainbow nation”.
We wanted to learn lessons from these countries, so that Zimbabwe’s political parties in the inclusive Government could draw lessons from fellow African countries.
I wrote about that experience in our Jomic News newsletter, so that is not the subject of this article.
My interest, rather, is the chaos going on in Harare between municipal police, kombi drivers and their touts.
Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, is a city wholly sited on a hill.
That means there are very few straight roads: most are circuitous and undulating in and out of valleys and streams. The landscape is breathtaking.
It would actually be faster to criss-cross Rwanda by leaping from hilltop to hilltop than by following its roads. But that is by the wayside.
This is my most enduring impression of Kigali.
There was a lot of construction work going on at the time of the visit, but up to now I still believe Kigali is one of the cleanest cities I have seen. It is very clean.
One of its landmarks are the armed soldiers along its streets. There are two armed soldiers on the side of the street every 100m or so.
Then there are the hundreds of motorcyclists on the streets. Kigali commuters mainly ride on motorcycles where Zimbabweans would jump into a commuter omnibus or the Vitz and Honda Fit.
All that has not taken the lustre off Kigali’s streets.
Our guide told us the secret. President Kagame had brought his military discipline into the home of every Rwandan family. He is very strict about cleanliness.
Littering is a serious offence, and every Rwandan knows what to do with his/her litter.
We were told that at the end of the month, every man, woman and child in Rwanda is required to join in the cleaning of their towns and countryside. That includes the president.
In addition, people are expected to engage in voluntary work. It is a new, growing culture in Rwanda.
Harare, on the other hand, has become the former Sunshine City. Of course I am not certain whether that label had any reference to the city’s cleanliness or it was a reference to nature.
Things have changed.
The population, both human and vehicular, has grown tremendously since Independence in 1980.
Even without factoring in commuter omnibuses, passenger vehicles are just so many, human traffic on the pavement thick and vendors are everywhere.
This is where our city authorities can learn a few lessons from Rwanda.
The Harare City Council recently opened a holding bay for commuter omnibuses along Coventry Road to try and decongest the CBD. This is said to be enough to accommodate all the registered kombis, estimated at 600. Most of them are not registered.
The project has been met with resistance from both kombi drivers and their touts and passengers, in some cases.
Old habits die hard.
The kombi drivers claim the holding bay is too far, meaning they waste fuel going to the bay as they await their turn to load passengers. This, they claim, might force them to raise commuter fares.
For their part, commuters find the new measures inconvenient. We are talking about people who are used to getting transport anywhere on just about any road.
The death of Zupco killed the concept of a bus stop. Now you wag a finger and a kombi picks you.
The result is that kombi drivers and council police officers have been engaged in dog fights to try and restore order in the city. These have been fatal at times.
But they reveal the scale of lawlessness and indiscipline which has almost become a culture in our lives.
A police officer or a soldier in uniform no longer commands the respect we were used to when we were growing up. At times he/she is an object of scorn and taunts by both kombi drivers and passengers.
Tougher measures are needed. That includes impounding the kombi itself and jailing the driver. That will force the vehicle owners to play their role.
But then council itself is not entirely clean; hence it has problems cleaning the city.
While the city authorities are doing a commendable job of trying to rid the city of ill-disciplined kombi crews, they have done almost nothing to deal with vendors selling anything from clothes to pirated DVDs and vegetables on municipal pavements.
In some cases, where council has barred kombis from parking and picking up passengers, it has immediately allocated the space to these schlockmeisters without provision for any sanitary facilities, let alone shelter.
That is certainly not the way to bring back the Sunshine City.
The council is showing that there was little thinking about the whole operation. There is need to build proper structures where vendors can be accommodated, and be made to pay for the shelter. That is the only way we can begin to talk of order in the city.
That calls for firmness, tough decisions on the part of law enforcers in collaboration with council.
It is possible for Harare to be clean like Kigali. What is required is resolve on the part of the city, and a change of culture.
It can be done.
