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Mozambique’s Association for Victims of Road Insecurity (AMVIRO) on Thursday called for “urgent measures” against road accidents, noting that the accident rate has turned the country’s roads into “death corridors”.
“The measures must be urgent. They cannot be announced just to lower the dust because the situation is dramatic and our roads are death corridors,” Alexandre Nhampossa, president of AMVIRO told Lusa.
Mozambique’s government has promised to strengthen measures to control road safety following the death in June of 13 people in a traffic accident in Manhiça district, southern Maputo province, but a source from the ministry of transport and communications told Lusa today that the new guidelines were still being “cooked up and harmonised.
The president of AMVIRO said that the delay in action against mortality caused by road accidents makes “the entire Mozambican society a culprit and accomplice”.
“We lack the citizenship to stop this mourning, and [we lack] compassion for life because the deaths on our roads have been going on for so long,” Alexandre Nhampossa said.
The new measures should strengthen traffic surveillance, with more police officers with integrity, immune to corruption, and adequate means, because many vehicles that are involved in accidents pass through Traffic Police checkpoints, Nhampossa argued.
“The position of the police commander-general [Bernardo Rafael] that traffic officers should be inspected has to be put into practice,” he stressed.
Moralising the authorities’ officers involves a firm fight against corruption, he continued, because the police “denounce corrupt drivers, but rarely do so concerning corrupt police officers”.
Greater focus should also be placed on the initiative of passengers to question and report misbehaving drivers.
“Just a few days ago, a video was circulated of a public transport driver eating and talking on his mobile phone, and passengers did nothing about this danger,” he mentioned.
On the other hand, the president of AMVIRO stressed that the vehicle inspection model must change radically because these services “tolerate and turn a blind eye to intolerable mechanical faults”.
There is a proliferation of false documents about the fitness of many vehicles, and there are areas with high traffic density without inspection services.
The vastness of the territory requires the operationalisation of mobile vehicle inspections so that this service is not only provided in the provincial capitals.
The president of AMVIRO noted that the authorities should assume that the poor state of the roads is also one of the causes of the rapid mechanical degradation of vehicles, contributing to road accidents.
“That’s why I welcome that the issue of the degradation of National Road No. 1 [the country’s main road] has become a topic on the agenda and the government has announced it is mobilising resources for the rehabilitation” of the road, he emphasised.
Nhampossa said road safety should be an essential part of the clauses in road concession contracts.
On Monday, three people died, and 15 were seriously injured when a long-distance bus crashed and overturned near a bridge in Monapo district, in Mozambique’s northern Nampula province.
Road fatality rates in Mozambique are rated as dramatic by several organisations.
A total of 32 people died a year ago in the most serious accident ever on the country’s roads, when two trucks and a bus were involved in an irregular overtaking in Manhiça, southern Mozambique.
On average, at least a thousand people die on Mozambican roads every year, according to AMVIRO figures.
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