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Lake Victoria accidents: Why is Tanzania prone to tragedy, not others?
2006-05-17 09:06:37
By Nimi Mweta
Comparisons were lately being struck between the mv Bukoba ferry accident in May 1996 and the latest incident involving yet another ferry.
In both cases the boats were more or less not seaworthy, but were allowed not only to sail but also to excessively load their cargo, itself a reminder not that people do not care for life or their safety as passengers, but have few choices at hand.
Life simply has to go on.
In the recent incident, reviewers profiling the situation said that they key issue is the fact that the boat had been sidelined from operations back in 2004, but somehow it has continued to function.
This has been explained as due to the prevalence of corruption, that operators were seeking to make a fast buck on passengers and for that matter the crew, that the regulatory body is toothless, etc.
But the principal item was that police were looking the other side as the law was being contravened.
For immediate purposes let us take all this to be true, and then confront the issue of how to get out of it.
Is there a situation, say of ’new zeal’ where a condemned boat will not be liked by anyone, where the regulatory agency will move to action when this happens, where passengers or traders who have heard something about that ship will not be interested in it?
Is there anything, for that matter, that will make the police instantly capricious and not accepting any compromise if the boat had to sail?
Put differently, the real issue that one has to confront when pondering over the repeated boat capsizing tragedies on the lake is that there is a behaviour pattern that is largely true of the Tanzanian side, and much less for the other lake user partner states.
While conditions are by and large comparable, there are specific features of the Tanzanian situation which makes it prone to hitting the edge of what is either not avoidable or is psychologically permissible.
This kind of situation is occurring with a regularity that surprises observers, for instance a major boat accident that comes several months after a presidential inauguration has taken place, that soon.
A section of opinion which again isn’t too atypical for our circumstances, developed the belief that the mv Bukoba accident was tied to occult activities, or bizarre rituals where no price is too high to solidify the regime, putting the chieftain beyond all reach.
While it is known that Egyptian kings used to be buried with a servant to help them in the world beyond, rituals involving large groups of people aren’t a tradition anywhere.
At most they were bizarre acts of deranged despots, for instance when the mother of Shaka the Zulu died, and mothers were prohibited from breastfeeding, and for a whole year, people were prohibited to plant crops. But that isn’t a custom.
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