Hardly a week goes by these days without the occurrence of some particularly gruesome accident on our streets which leaves us numbed and, more than that, leaves behind mangled corpses, horrific injury-related disfigurements and devastated families. As a nation we appear to have come to take these occurrences in our stride, seemingly indifferent to the fact that reports on these accidents and their consequences bespeak a wider sense of recklessness that diminishes our nation in all sorts of ways.
Worryingly, these days, the surfeit of recklessness and the consequences appear to evoke far fewer robust official expressions of concern and seemingly even fewer admonitions that underscore the fact that the numbers of fatality-linked road mishaps are, in considerable measure, a function of a dimension of indiscipline that sits far from well with our officially espoused development aspirations.
Nor can there be, at this juncture, no question than that the Police Traffic Department, the designated enforcement institution where traffic management is concerned, has become almost powerless as reflected not just in the extent of the unceasing carnage but also in the fact that, in the circumstances, we have not been presented with even a shred of evidence that law enforcement has raised its game. Part of the crisis in local traffic management has to do with the fact that the physical and strategic resources necessary to rein in the situation have simply not been forthcoming. Widely media-circulated pictures of new fleets of vehicles acquired from China and wherever else and pressed into traffic management service do not translate into a commensurate lessening of the scale of the substantive problem. There is, moreover, a similar absence of evidence that, at the level of planning and execution, we have evolved anything even remotely resembling an adequate strategic blueprint for countrywide traffic management.
Going forward and in the present circumstances, one gets the impression that in an environment of a seemingly unchanging approach to traffic management we are going to have to rely, increasingly, on a generous measure of good fortune, luck, for want of a better term, if we are to bring the prevailing carnage under control. In effect, the Police Traffic Department, taking into account its present ‘strategic’ position would appear to be on a hiding to nowhere insofar as bringing the situation under control is concerned.
That said, any attempt to address the traffic carnage on our roads by simply ‘beating up’ on the Police Traffic Department will take us down the wrong road. Resourcing the Department to the level that adequately responds to the scale of its traffic management responsibilities lies in the hands of central government at which level it often does not appear that decision-making takes adequate account of the nexus between effective traffic management and the wider development of the country. Indeed, and this has been the case over many years, one recollects that high-level policy pronouncements that address the issue of the nexus between effective traffic management and the broader development of the country are virtually non-existent. Since government is bound to find out, sooner rather than later that its oil and gas-driven visions of national development will rely increasingly on a significantly stepped up level of road use and that issues like the types and numbers of vehicles using the roads, the quality of our roads, the discipline of our road users and the professionalism of our traffic management regime are, in fact, critical considerations in any holistic development plan.
The reality is that it does not appear, either at the level of central government or at the level of the Police Traffic Department, directly, that there is a serious awareness of the considerable deficit in our road use culture that reflects itself in the high price that we continue to pay in terms of the retardation of the aspirations that we continually articulate in our oil and gas-saturated field of dreams. Even if the eventuality does not arise tomorrow, sooner rather than later this irrefutable fact will occur to those who rule.
The reality is that the holistic development of a country cannot be contemplated outside the framework of the importance of continually upgrading and refining the road use and traffic administration regime to take account of such factors as population growth, increases in the number of vehicles that enter the country and use the roads, the importance of rolling out a continually upgraded all-weather road infrastructure to take account of the increased national road use demand and the devising and continual upgrading of laws and strategies to rein in road use delinquencies including (in our particular circumstance) daredevil motorcyclists, irresponsible mini-bus drivers, young ‘fast car’ drivers for whom speed limits are altogether non-existent and those others who simply have no concern whatsoever with such considerations as speed limits, traffic lights and the use of helmets. In some of these respects it has to be said that the traffic management regime has been decidedly complicit.
Going forward, it really is a matter of whether or not both central government and the traffic management regime within the Guyana Police Force take a firm decision to change their approach to the problem. Frankly, what we see of the prevailing official public posture does not suggest that there is the serious acceptance of a nexus between our roads infrastructure, road use culture and traffic enforcement regime, on the one hand and the various other strands that comprise national development on the other. Underlining that nexus and ensuring its effective application is the responsibility of the state and it is the government that holds the enforcement powers. There can, at this stage, be no excuse for failure to seriously implement the correct measures incrementally but with an unmistakable sense of purpose. What government cannot afford to do at this juncture is to appear to be indifferent to a circumstance that has now grown into a considerable crisis.
