Submitted by FAN on Sun, 18/09/2011 - 16:41
CHANNELS:
Earlier this week, I watched as a motorcyclist carrying a passenger — neither of them wearing helmets — managed to slide a good 80 per cent of his vehicle underneath the chassis of a gleaming Landcruiser.
First thing in the morning is too early to encounter death, if there is a good time for that sort of thing at all. I was equally relieved and infuriated to watch the driver and his passenger get up, dust themselves off and continue with their journey after a brief exchange of insults with the 4WD driver.
A shrug, nothing more than five minutes of inconvenience, the whole incident washed away in the noise of the rat race.
On Saturday, September10, mv Spice Islander was on its way to Pemba when it capsized off the coast of Unguja. The official numbers state that over 600 passengers survived and were rescued, while 203 bodies have been retrieved to date. Many of those who died were children.
Although ballpark figures have been given for the number of passengers and the tonnage of cargo that Spice Islander was carrying, there is absolute certainty about one thing: The vessel was dangerously, woefully overloaded. The incident has been named an accident, something that I have had trouble accepting. What the sinking has in common with the first incident is reckless endangerment, a fundamental lack of respect for human life.
When mv Bukoba capsized and sank within sight of Mwanza city in 1996, the aftermath was an attitude of “never again.” In the analysis of what caused that tragedy, the problems seem to be similar to those that afflicted Spice Islander: Too many people, too much cargo, no discernible safety measures, very few passengers who could swim, no exact information about who was on the ship, questionable maintenance.
And yet here we are again, this time off the coast of Zanzibar, waiting for South African divers to tell us what is left of the Spice Islander. There is something going on here, and for once I have no intention of blaming the government for it. At least not directly.
In the media, the aftermath of the Zanzibar boat tragedy has elicited a range of responses. Some are obsessed with the official reactions of a variety of sources: Who did or did not do what, why, and what that will mean for them in the immediate future.
Others have focused on the human story, chronicling how families are still desperately trying to find information about loved ones. One small bunch, a quiet corner really, has been teasing out the implications of this accident in terms of culpability: Whose fault was it and what can be done about this?
The list of those who have some difficult questions to answer is known, beginning with the owner and operator of the mv Spice Islander, the captain and staff of the ship, the Zanzibar port authorities that allowed such a compromised ship to sail, all of the authorities charged with regulating marine safety.
Unfortunately, we “regular Tanzanians” are the only ones who are capable of making service providers stop their crazed, capitalist penchant for gambling with our lives in pursuit of profit. Ultimately, we are the only regulating authority that matters.
There are a hundred choices to be made in a day and living in a developing country means embracing the fact that creative “solutions” to everyday problems are necessary. And we have to admit that we are allergic to regulation for all kinds of reasons, most of them good. There isn’t a regulatory authority in Tanzania that has managed to impress us with its strength of character, or its diligence, and we are well aware that greasing the right palms makes regulation more of an ideal than a reality in our society.
So we conduct business our own way, taking chances.
Maybe it is time to re-examine that attitude, from a societal perspective, and allow the events leading up to the mv Spice Islander tragedy to affect how we behave as individuals. Maybe we don’t need to ride the middle lane both ways on motorcycles and Bajajs, daring motorists to test their brakes. Maybe we don’t have to urge bus drivers to go faster so that we can get to our upcountry destinations faster.
And perhaps it is time that we accepted that when the bus is full, when the plane is full, when the boat is full... well, it’s full. Catch the next one. If we must gamble, at least let’s try to throw the dice in the direction of life.