Government Negligence Causing Deaths

Set Up a Government Funeral Service Department

 

By Mthoniswa Banda[i]

 

Dear Mr President,

 

By the time this letter reaches your copper plated desk, one family of Lusaka would have lost a bread winner, father, uncle and the children would have lost a driver, who every morning drove them to school on his daily school runs.

Mr. President, as we speak today, vacancy would have arisen in the health communication department of the Ministry of Health and the Environment Health Technologists (EHT) would have mourned the loss of one of their members.

Mr. President, even the national tax woman, the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA), would have their total monthly income tax reduced by one person from our active labour force.

By the time you reach this paragraph of this letter, your church Mr. President, the Seventh Day Adventist, the SDA Chainama Branch, would have held two church services, a memorial service and a burial service for their departed church deacon.

Even the comedians, that bunch of clowns, jesters and joke crackers of this country, under the Comedians Association of Zambia (COAZ), would have accompanied one of their own influential member and mentor, through songs, jokes and what-have-you to the other side of town, as the late Edem Djokote would say, to Memorial Park.

Even church musicians and choir members, would have played their holy Jerusalem-land-of-of-gold-and-flowers song to one of their lost brothers.

Mr. President, by the time you read this, comedian and artist, Church Deacon, civil servant, husband and father of many Brighton Sinkala’s body would have been interred in one of Lusaka’s graveyards after his trip to a wedding in Kitwe ended up in the Kabwe Mortuary.

Mr. President, the reason I am writing you this missive is not because there has been a death in Zambia or that death still remains a mystery to many of us. No Sir.

It is also not because life in Zambia is cheap and that any day and any time a Zambian is likely to die in funny and un explained circumstances of “he was just fine a few minutes ago and he is dead now.” No Sir.

The reason I am calling you out Sire is because in Zambia, since the days of KK, FTJ and now you, we do not have a Government Funeral Service Department (GFSD). A Government Funeral Service Department that is mandated to hold departmental funerals in government offices, for public officers that wilfully and negligently cause deaths of Zambians.

We need a department of the Government, that like the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), would hold a funeral service at the place of work and in any government department, whose lacklustre approach to work and duty, would have caused a death or many deaths of citizens through their negligent policies, actions or lack of them, attitudes or sheer laziness.

You see Mr. President, each time a funeral is held in any part of the country because of a pre-mature death, a promising life or productive life cut short, there must be a causer of that death in the government offices. A death caused by government negligence, dereliction of duty, a delay in release of life saving funds or programmes.

These funerals Mr. President, ought to be a reminder to the duty bearers, of the duties that these public offices owe to citizens and also to serve as a name-and-shame campaign for those departments and offices where most Zambian deaths have occurred or are deliberately being caused.

Mr. President, now allow us to look one by one at the government departments causing deaths in Zambia by dereliction of duty.

A month ago a truck load of church women in Luapula province perished when the truck they were traveling in lost control and plunged Chaushi Hill around 22 hours and only received help three hours later at one hour after midnight! This road like many other roads have no reflective signs and is poorly marked for danger signs and sharp curves.

Recently in Kasama, four persons, including a 12 months-old baby, died after a motorcycle collided with an Ambulance around 20hrs on Lukupa Road. The report says the accident happened when the motorcycle, which was on the road without licence and registration, turned without warning and was rammed by an ambulance which was coming from the opposite direction.

In this case of our comedian and artist, husband, church deacon and environmental health technologist Brighton Sinkala, a truck that had no business being parked in the middle of a busy and heavily congested dangerous and tolled international highway, the Great North, managed to cut short his overtaking manoeuvre when his German engineered machine, rammed into the rear of this truck and veered into the on-coming lane when Tanzanian commercial bus rammed the Mercedes Benz leading to fatal body injuries and damage to the car that led to his untimely death. Mr. Sinkala did not die on the spot. Video recordings of the accident scene show hapless Zambians watching him suffer from the painful injuries on the rough gravel roadside floor as no emergency services were on site and even the ambulances from the very Ministry of Health (MoH) that Mr. Sinkala worked for where no-where to be seen.

Even if the ambulance would have come, most likely this would have been a hard floor land cruiser without any emergency equipment and trained emergency medical technicians (EMTs) on board.

As you are aware, presence of EMTs provide out of hospital emergency medical care and transportation for critical and emergent patients and these have the basic knowledge and skills necessary to stabilize and safely transport patients in cases of emergence.

Emergency Medical Technicians are a critical link between the scene of an emergency and the health care system. But Zambia does not have this!

This death and many others before them must call to an end to these continued failures of those tasked with ensuring that lives are protected and saved through their daily operations in government offices. Those whose duty is to put in place safety measures on our roads and in our road management policies to ensure that no accident happens because of bad road designs, poor or lack of proper and correct signage or funds to upgrade our roads, must jack up their standards and do their jobs.

Even those that provide support services to this road infrastructure that in the event that an accident did occur, emergency health services and first responders must be on site to ensure lives are not lost and where one is lost proof must be shown that all that ought to have been done was done to save lives.

May be when the number of funerals are held in these departments and offices by the proposed GFSD, these civil servants and their bosses would take their tax paid and tax funded jobs serious. May be when a family is grieving the loss of their loved ones at the hands of a negligent government wing or department, and the GSFM holds a funeral in these offices, the pain of the grieving family will be transferred as shame to these negligent offices!

Let’s us make it hard to die or lose lives on our roads.

Your sincerely,

 

Mthoniswa Banda

[i] The Author is a Social Commentator and critic, Lobbyist and Human Rights Defender,  Media and Communications Consultant  at Mthoniswa Banda Consultancy  www.mbzambia.com