As if his statements about the unlawful killing of Ms Donna Herod in Buxton last September were not damaging enough, Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee seized the opportunity of the loss of human life within his portfolio to score another own goal.
The minister’s latest utterances came after the worst traffic tragedy in the town of Linden when a minibus drove into a lorry loaded with lumber near Amelia’s Ward, killing 10 persons. Mr Rohee saw it fit to use that unhappy occasion to make the astonishing admission that most drivers are not qualified to drive minibuses and that many of them are ‘permitted to operate minibuses’ despite not meeting the legal requirements.
Mr Rohee, within whose ministry resides responsibility for testing drivers to receive licences, declar-ed in a matter-of-fact manner “I would not doubt that many of these drivers don’t have a licence to drive [minibuses]. Many of them are not qualified to drive but somehow or the other they find themselves behind a wheel driving a minibus.”
Isn’t the minister aware that it is his job to prevent such persons from driving and to arrest wrongdoers?
More vaguely, the minister added that “We have been having discussions with the traffic department to ensure that before a person is given a driver’s licence, he or she has to pass a number of additional tests before they are issued.” What has been the outcome of those discussions?
As he has done previously when confronted by serious security crises, the minister cloaked his accountability with facile assurances that amendments will be made to existing legislation. This time, he undertook to have the law changed to prohibit persons from driving public transportation after less than two years experience. It is known that some persons were driving minibuses even after being licensed for less than a year!
All of a sudden, Mr Rohee seems to have discovered the need to put measures in place to increase fines for traffic offences and to contemplate issuing traffic tickets. He discovered too that there are loopholes in the criminal justice system through which many drivers resume their reckless ways regardless of having been made to pay fines in the court after being convicted for traffic offences. “We cannot have people going repeatedly before the court, paying fines and going back to drive minibuses and creating these accidents,” Mr Rohee asserted. But this is exactly what has been happening.
Promises come easy to Mr Rohee. Soon after being installed as Minister of Home Affairs last year, he told the congregation at the funeral service of a child who was killed with two teenagers when two speeding minibuses collided on the Rupert Craig Highway at Liliendaal, that a new traffic court would be set up “within a month” as one of the measures to address dangerous driving on the roadways.
The following month, in his message to mark National Road Safety Week, Mr Rohee promised a number of other initiatives including “more foot, motor-cycle and vehicular patrols by the police force” in an effort to return some level of sanity to the roadways. So much for promises!
While the minister talks the talk, innocent persons are being killed at a rate of over three every week on the roads. Recently, a three-year-old pupil of Blairmont Nursery School died after being struck by a minibus and dragged several yards on the Blairmont public road, West Bank Berbice. A seventy-year-old pensioner, who had just gotten off a bus and was crossing the East Coast Demerara public road, was struck down and killed by a motor-car on the Good Hope Public Road. And so it goes.
Public apprehension about the way road safety is being managed was only intensified by the minister’s admission that he was aware that criminals, probably unlicensed, “have been driving around in AT-192s,” that there are motor-cars on the streets “with false number plates,” and that persons are “getting bogus drivers’ licences,” permitting them to operate minibuses.
If the minister knows all of these things why, after over a year in office and after so many bloody deaths, has he has done so little to improve road safety?
