•THE number of accidents on Zambian roads has gone up in the recent past.

By STEPHEN  KAPAMBWE –

“THE number of road traffic accidents in Zambia is too high to handle”, Road Traffic and Safety Agency (RTSA) director Zindaba Soko said recently on ZBNC Morning Live television programme.
The agency has since employed interventions to curb carnage on Zambian roads, among which is the fast-track court system aimed at rapidly dealing with road traffic offences.
That initiative has, from January to date, helped RTSA secure 3,500 convictions in Lusaka alone. The agency has also trained 12 prosecutors and is rolling out the training intervention to Central, Copperbelt and Eastern provinces.
The agency is also working with the defence forces to raise the required manpower needed to arrest the daunting problem of road accidents.
In an effort to help RTSA achieve safety on Zambian roads, SABMiller subsidiaries in the country signed a K200,000 memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2013 with the agency spanning a period of three years. The MoU, which involved Zambian Breweries Plc, National Breweries Plc and Heinrich’s Syndicate, will provide monetary support, equipment and manpower to the RTSA.
However, notwithstanding the results which the partnership has achieved, Zambian Breweries Plc which represents the SABMiller subsidiaries says the partnership with RTSA would now be long term.
Speaking in an interview recently, Zambian Breweries corporate affairs director Luke Njovu said the responsible consumption partnership is long term.
“The initial MoU we have signed with RTSA is for a period of three to five years. But it is a very long term partnership. As long as alcohol will be produced and consumed, this programme will be relevant to the country,” Mr Njovu said.
He said Zambian Breweries would continue sponsoring the partnership which is expected to take different forms for the long term. The partnership, dubbed the ‘responsible consumption programme’ would this year add the underage drinking dimension that is targeted at discouraging young people from consuming alcohol.
Mr Njovu said originally, the responsible consumption campaign was initiated as a result of the company’s concerns over trends of irresponsible alcohol consumption in the country.
For example, the Zambia Road Accident data 2010 report obtained by Zambian Breweries showed that more than 1,200 people died in road traffic accidents in Zambia. 50 per cent of those road traffic deaths involved alcohol and drunk driving.
Studies by RTSA further showed that road traffic crashes in Zambia kill an average of 2,000 people per year and injure thousands more.
They indicated that road crashes have been ranked the third cause of death for people aged between 5 and 25 years, and that it was estimated that the country loses over K1.3 billion every year through road traffic accidents in terms of cost of damage to property, loss of income to affected persons, hospital bills and cost of funerals.
The figure excludes the unquantifiable cost of emotional loss.
The risk posed by drinking and driving has also been documented by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in its Drinking and Driving Road Safety Manual where it warns that consumption of alcohol increases the risk of being involved in a crash for motorists and pedestrians as it not only impairs processes critical to safe road use, such as vision and reaction time but is also associated with impaired judgment.
Alcohol consumption and driving is also linked to other high-risk road use behaviours such as speeding or not using seat-belts.
Therefore, in complying with the SABMiller position statements on alcohol – which have been developed from studies like those of WHO, Zambian Breweries was obliged to design interventions in partnership with various stakeholders, like RTSA, aimed at mitigating challenges of irresponsible alcohol consumption.
That marked the birth of the RTSA/SABMiller subsidiaries partnership which was aimed at providing RTSA with financial resources, equipment, such as breathalysers and evidence machines, as well as resources, like manpower.
“So, the objectives of the programme is that first and foremost, we want to provide information to members of the public in terms of what the law says on drinking and driving. From our perspective as Zambian Breweries, if a person drinks, they should not drive. That is the basic message that we carry.
“We know that in Zambia – for instance, there is a legal minimum alcohol blood level limit which is 0.08 milligrams per litre, but it is usually difficult for someone to know that they have reached that limit.
“So usually, we just encourage that if you know that you are going to drink, have a plan on how you are going to move; instead of relying on yourself to drive maybe you can have a friend who is not drinking to drive you around or you may either get a taxi or get on a bus. If you drink, do not drive,” Mr Njovu said.
The second objective of the MoU was to encourage retailers to be aware of the prevailing law on drinking, and the third objective was to provide the necessary equipment to enable RTSA carry out its mandate by providing additional manpower which is made up of volunteers from the staff of Zambian Breweries.
In its quest to operate within the law, Zambia Breweries encourages application of existing legislation on alcohol consumption. The brewer feels that if somebody is found to be driving under the influence of alcohol, the law should be applied.
“So, we are very much in support of the fast track court system. If somebody is found to be driving under the influence of alcohol they need to be prosecuted and those penalties should apply. So we encourage that process and that is the other message we take to our consumers,” Mr Njovu.
He said many stakeholders initially wondered why a brewer had decided to partner with RTSA in implementing the responsible consumption programme which seemed to restrict the sale of alcohol to members of the public.
However, Mr Njovu said responsible consumption programme which forms the basis of the RTSA partnership is not just about corporate social responsibility but also about business sense.
He said from a business perspective, Zambian Breweries feels that consumers who are responsible in their consumption are likely to be more productive, more economically empowered and therefore are likely going to be sustainable than consumers who tend to be irresponsible in their consumption.
Such irresponsible consumers risk being fired from their employment, or risk being involved in a car crash as a result of their drinking. That would mean they become economically disadvantaged and that would eventually start to impact on sustainability of the market for Zambian Breweries.
“For us to continue in business for the long term, society has to be prosperous for the long term as well. So our product should not subtract from the wellbeing of society. It should be there to a level where it meets the needs of our consumers. It should not be consumed to an extent where its starts harming the health or the social status of our consumers. That is where our responsible consumption programme really targets at,” he said.
Mr Njovu feels his company’s partnership with RTSA has had an impact in the sense that members of the public feel there is heightened sense of safety on the roads, especially in Lusaka, given the RTSA presence on roads which has become a common feature on weekends and public holidays.
He says Zambian Breweries is not out to inconvenience anybody but wants to play its part in ensuring that roads are safe for members of the public.
But Mr Njovu admits that although progress towards attaining road safety has been made, a lot still needs to be done. In as much as many activities have been initiated to make roads safe, occasions of people driving under the influence of alcohol are still rife.
People do not just drink and later on drive but some even go to an extent of driving while taking alcohol in their cars.
This is but one of the reasons why Zambian Breweries has decided to expand the partnership to include other sensitisation messages such as underage drinking.
The RTSA director said his agency is equally concerned about the new risks which are making attainment of road safety difficult. He sighted use of mobile phones by motorists, especially the sending and receiving of text messages and accessing of social media, as some of the risky behaviours that threaten road safety.
In an effort to rid roads of drivers with questionable credentials, the agency recently undertook a countrywide inspection and subsequently deregistered a number of private driving schools that were said to be failing to meet basic standards of service delivery.
Capital Buses proprietor Ishmael Khankara said blaming one group of people, like minibus drivers, for being behind the carnage on roads would help no one. He said Zambian roads would only be safe when individual motorists start thinking of other road users first.
“It does not need to take a policeman with a gun or an RTSA officer to always watch over what you are doing for you to make the right decision, otherwise how many officers are we going to have and how many laws are we going to enact?” Mr Khankara asked.
He called for the involvement of all stakeholders and advised every road user to take interest in ensuring that Zambian roads are safe by avoiding drunk-driving and other risky endeavours that only result in injury and loss of life.