Wed, 14 Dec 2016 11:23:36 +0000
Dear Editor,
While I agree on the need for sanity on the roads, I strongly feel that some of the measures being pursued by our RTSA may backfire someday and the Agency may actually find itself in courts of law.
Take the planned SI to cut on the number of hours each driver can make on each day, just what is RTSA’s problem?
Okay, it has so far allowed private vehicles to continue driving at night and die in the consequent accidents. I totally smell double dealing?
RTSA should know by now that it is not only Public Service Vehicles (PSV) that cause accidents at whatever time of the day, so why this hype?
Even its excitement over fast-track courts to try and send motorists to prison for drunken driving, for me, I think it’s too much punishment for this kind of offence. Sure RTSA, one cannot drink two or three bottles of Mosi and be able to drive and smelling the stuff because you exist? I don’t buy it!
The whole matter, in my view, has been blown out of proportion. RTSA should find a better way of going round the problem instead of the current spectacle it has found itself in.
You do not use an AK47 to correct your erring child or do you RTSA?
For now, I think motorists should come up with an association to protect their interests including taking RTSA to court where it acts ultra vires.
RTSA is not a God to impose itself on citizens in the manner it is doing and I hope our transport minister will take profound interest in this issue.
These drunken drivers, using their hard-earned Kwacha are not criminals which RTSA has decided to mix with hard-core villains in our over filled prisons. Is that the way RTSA is going to help decongest our prisons?
For starters, let offenders be given community work instead of sending them to prisons.
Hear me on this one, RTSA. Again, these people you are sending to prisons are not criminals just for the sake of you appearing tough on our roads.
Let there be sanity in RTSA first and the rest will follow in.
Above all, I hear these fast-track courts are nothing but Kangaroo sort of courts where justice is always thrown to the winds. Please, RTSA sober up.
Josiah Soko,
Salima Road Matero
