HARARE – Transport Minister Felix Mhona has blamed Zimbabwe’s road carnage on insufficient infrastructural development that has been overtaken by a ballooning vehicle population in the country.
He was addressing delegates at the Inland Transport Committee Forum for Road Safety event in Geneva, Switzerland.
Zimbabwe is one of the many countries that have missed one of the Sustainable Development Goals’ target to halve the number of deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by the year 2020.
The minister blamed the situation on the mismatch between the existing road infrastructure and the continued increase in vehicles on the country’s roads.
“The race for economic development, at the backdrop of insufficient road infrastructure development, compounded by a disproportionate vehicle population growth has created this untenable situation resulting in increased crashes and fatalities,” said the minister.
According to statistics, Zimbabwe’s registered vehicle population was 940,000 in 2015, up from 679,000 in 2005.
The minister also attributed road traffic accidents to what he said was the country’s failure to break from the “legacies of the past”.
“While our counterparts from the developed world have fared comparably well in adopting sustainable measures to reduce the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents, we, in developing countries, remain entangled in the legacies and inequities of the past,” he said.
Minister Mhona said last year that 1,559 road accident deaths were recorded in the country with 7,851 people injured between January and September during the year.
Similarly, a total of 148 people were killed in 2 723 road traffic accidents recorded countrywide between December 15 2022 and January 15 this year in Zimbabwe, according to police.
