Very Sad

Scene of the Mulanje Accident, Wednesday 18/8/10

One piece of sad news today was that a good friend of Arthur (he's our driver and gopher at the office, and a truly nice guy) was killed yesterday in a minibus accident near Mulanje. Apparently there were five people who lost their lives in the incident. Arthur was taking the afternoon off to go to the funeral, so I offered to drive him to Limbe where he could get a minibus (would you believe). En route, we talked about the minibus situation in Malawi. Before coming out here I read in the guidebooks that these were the great value, interesting way to get around. I now know that I'm never ever going to get in one in my life. 

A Typical Minibus

To explain, there are literally thousands of these things around Malawi. I guess in one sense they do provide a way for most Malawians to get around. The vehicles are universally old Japanese people carriers, but once in the hands of the minibus drivers, bad things happen. Firstly, they are not maintained. At all. You see them broken down all over the place. They are always packed way beyond their capacity, and if they break down, everyone has to get out and find another minibus to complete their journeys. Then because they aren't maintained, the majority of them belch enormous clouds of black smoke from their exhaust pipe. Their tyres are often as bald as me. The drivers pay little heed to the rules of the road (such as they are), and will pull out, pull in, or turn without any warning or indication. I'm told that many of the drivers are drunk.  

The thing that really freaks me out is that they are scared witless that their fuel will be syphoned off, so they run with practically no fuel in the tank all the time, carrying plastic containers of petrol inside the minibus to trickle fuel into the tank when the engine stops. So what happens? The heat or a spark will ignite the petrol, and quite often you'll see the burnt-out remains of a minibus at the side of the road. In the case of the tragic Mulanje accident, the minibus rolled over after bursting a tyre. The driver was one of those killed, but the reports said that the minibus was licenced to carry 14, but was in fact carrying 17 people. Even 14 is way too many.

What I can't get my head around is why the police let them get away with it (although one newspaper article I read did suggest a reason). Given the number of roadblocks around the place, you'd think there would be very few left, but no. One of the national papers here gave full force to a torrent of abuse against the minibus drivers after another accident that happened just up the road from the office when there were two fatalities.  

It's a sad, sad scandal that young lives are being lost because these menaces are driving on the Malawi roads.