HARARE - Zimbabwe’s truck drivers can relax. For now, nobody will ask them to prove Pythagoras’ theorem before they are allowed on the road.
The Central Vehicle Registry (CVR) has told Parliament it does not support a proposal that would have required five O-level passes, including English and Mathematics, for a professional driving licence. Acting CVR registrar Saston Muzenda told the Portfolio Committee on Transport that Zimbabwe has already professionalised its driver licensing, and is close to introducing a penalty points system that could see repeat offenders have their licences suspended or cancelled.
“The process our drivers go through is internationally recognised and is one of the best in terms of practice,” Muzenda said, according to The Herald, as carried by Pindula News. “From a professional point of view, we have already professionalised our drivers within the region. And professional drivers who drive for a living have more laws to obey than a private motorist.”
Where the idea came from
The proposal came from the Drivers’ Association of Zimbabwe (DAZ), whose petition reached Parliament in August and was referred to the transport committee. DAZ wants the driving profession formalised under a statutory professional body that would set minimum educational entry requirements. Its president, Nicholas Mabwe, argued that many drivers lacked proper road ethics.
At present, Pindula News noted, a Zimbabwean licence requires no educational qualification beyond passing the driving test.
The petition arrived at a grim moment. Road carnage has become a major national concern, with most accidents blamed on human error. Transport Minister Felix Mhona, launching a holiday road safety campaign in Mazowe in early August, named stray livestock and human error as the two recurring causes in preliminary accident data. “Vandalised fences and stray animals are killing people,” he said.
An MP does the maths
Not everyone thought the education test would pass its own exam. Discent Bajila, a member of Parliament, wrote in a commentary on ZimEye that, before the committee had even looked at it, the petition’s probability of success “can’t be more than a single digit percentage.”
His reasoning was arithmetic. “Given that the O Level pass rate rarely goes above 40%, it is common cause that the majority of Zimbabweans don’t have 5 O Levels,” he wrote. In a country where people are told to create their own jobs, he argued, “we shouldn’t find ourselves closing majorities out of low hanging fruits.”
The CVR’s answer was gentler but reached the same place. Muzenda said Zimbabwean drivers already undergo rigorous testing, are recognised across the region, and that there was no indication they were considered incompetent. He said the government was working to make the learner’s licence test more accessible, not less.
The cartoon, the pothole and the prayer
The cartoon accompanying this story stages the proposal at a roadblock, where an officer waves away a driver’s 40 accident-free years and demands his certificate, while a colleague wonders whether he can calculate the depth of a pothole with Pythagoras. The potholes in the drawing will look familiar to anyone who drives for a living.
A second cartoon goes further, showing officials on their knees on a cratered highway beside a traditional healer, under the line “Road carnage? Call the spirits, not the road engineers”. ZimDaily has found no official proposing that. But the spiritual response to road deaths is not entirely the cartoonist’s invention.
On 19 August churches held cleansing prayers at the Ngundu blackspot on the Ngundu-Tanganda road in Masvingo province. The next night, police said, a Toyota Probox carrying ten passengers collided head-on with a Hino truck at the 2km peg. Four passengers died on the spot.
In late August, after a crash near Chivhu that The Blast reported claimed 27 lives, Archbishop James Jahwi Chirwa of the Zvapupu Zvajesu Apostolic Church urged indigenous churches to fight road carnage “both spiritually and physically”. Mhona, attending the funeral, struck a more earthly note. “The majority of these crashes are caused by speeding, overtaking errors, fatigue and disregard of road rules,” he said.
What happens next
The committee must now make its recommendation on the petition. The CVR’s preferred fix is technology: a penalty points system linked to a new smart traffic management system with cameras to detect offences.
For drivers, that is probably better news than a Maths exam. Whether the cameras can see the bottom of a pothole is another question.
