Zimbabwe Racing Buses In Fatal Crash

A Zimbabwe rural bus (called chicken buses in tourist parlance) is seen here at a bus depot in Harare. One bud just like this one has collided with a smaller T35 bus in the Murehwa area, killing one person, the driver. But it is the circumstances leading to the accident that would be comical if the whole thing were not so tragic. It remains to be seen what happens to this particular bus company, since recklessness was clearly a factor

Harare, Zimbabwe, 24 August 2009

A long-distance bus on the Murehwa route in Zimbabwe has collided head-on with a government-owned (ZUPCO) bus resulting in the death of one of the drivers.

Passengers on the racing bus, owned by a company called Home Boy, say that the owner of the bus was a passenger on the bus and was egging his driver on, urging him to overtake a bus that was in front of him.

The driver obliged but overtook the bus he was racing in front of oncoming traffic.

When the driver of the Home Boy Bus saw that he was going towards a head-on collision with the ZUPCO coming from the opposite direction, he tried to escape by jumping out of his bus, which keeled over and crushed him. He died on the spot.

The bus the Home Boy driver and his boss were racing did not stop when it saw the incident.

Ten people were injured in the accident.

The bus Home Boy collided with was a Mazda T35 ZUPCO bus, one of those mini buses now used by the state-owned bus company because of their reliability.

It is not yet clear as I write this (about (9:00 p.m. Zimbabwe time) how seriously passengers have been injured.

You will probably get more details of this tomorrow.

This comes hot on the heels of two other tragic bus accidents, one of which claimed more than 40 lives. Although it has been said that the state of our roads is partly to blame, we all know that defensive driving courses, which these drivers must undergo by law, teaches us that the more dismal the state of the road, the more caution a driver has to take.

The Home Boy bus driver and his boss obviously never heard of such advice and one wonders what they were thinking, especially now when two other horrendous accidents are still fresh in the minds of the people.