Flattened,
beheaded or ft dangling, they are no longer guardians of traffic flow and safety.
They are
victims of a madness where wild honking is the new law and what ordinarily
should be a thoroughfare has become a jungle.
Instead of
enforcing harmony, they now litter junctions across Harare like relics of
failed peace.
From Nemakonde
Road to Herbert Chitepo Avenue, from High Glen Road to Samora Machel Avenue and
from Seke Road to Julius Nyerere Way, poles lie shattered, heads twisted off or
drooping like wilting sunflowers, and lanterns reduced to broken glass and exposed
wires.
What was once
structured is now savaged.
But this is no
freak accident.
It is a
pattern, a cycle and crisis where Harare’s traffic lights are casualties of
reckless motorists, absent traffic police, poor planning and official lethargy.
Drive along
Nemakonde Road from Marlborough, Westgate and Bluff Hill into Harare’s central
business district (CBD) via King George Road and you will experience a perilous
ritual.
The stretch
from Harare Drive through to King George Road resembles a battlefield.
Lanterns look
skyward, pleading to indifferent heavens. At the Harare Drive-Nemakonde Road
intersection, where four lanes converge in frenzied uncertainty, the traffic
light system is under siege.
On a recent
morning, the wreckage looked fresh: twisted steel, glass and a bouquet of wires
drooping from a cracked signal head.
A single pole,
dislodged from its concrete footing, lay across the tarmac.
On the opposite
side, two yellow steel poles lay sprawling, stripped of their essentials,
completing the massacre.
Exposed wires,
stones, bricks, plastics and debris were strewn about, creating a picture of a
war zone.
A reckless
driving culture, marked by speeding kombis, mishikashika, drunk drivers and
unlicensed motorists and those who generally disregard road etiquette, has
exposed traffic lights to new gods.
The aforesaid
intersection has been blacked out most of the time since the traffic lights
were installed and Nemakonde Road rehabilitated, causing chaos and collisions.
The scene is
not isolated.
“The crashes
are no longer surprising. It always
happens at night. These poles are somehow cursed,” said a nearby vendor,
Dunmore Matambanadzo.
He gestures at
the destruction.
“They put in
new lights earlier this year. Weeks later, they were gone. Since then, it is
just chaos, particularly at peak hours.”
His tone is
tired, not from telling the story, but from living it.
“Rarely does a
day pass without accidents occurring, sometimes pileups, but none fatal yet.”
Matambanadzo
believes that even if replaced, the lights would be hit again within days.
The poles, he
argues, are too close to the road, vulnerable to haulage trucks turning right
into Harare Drive.
The carnage
continues at Nemakonde and King George, where three lights have been flattened.
At King George and Cork Road, one light is entirely gone.
At Josiah
Tongogara and Milton, and Herbert Chitepo and Leopold Takawira, the signals are
absent, malfunctioning or simply ignored. At these junctions, the rule is
“guess and go” and let the will of God prevail.
This
western-northern artery into the CBD serves thousands of commuters daily.
Yet traffic
signals are under attack.
The cost?
Human lives,
twisted metal and unending frustration. As tempers flare, drivers barrel
through blind turns.
Pedestrians —
vendors, schoolchildren and the elderly — dart between lanes of chaos.
“It is not just
frustrating; it is terrifying. You treat each broken light as a gamble, and too
often, luck runs out,” reckons David Tshuma, a commuter from Marlborough.
Across town, at
Samora Machel Avenue and Simon Vengai Muzenda Street, one pole bows with its
head wrecked off.
Another lies on
the tarmac, its three-way signal face down, as if knocked out by a car with a
grudge.
On paper, Harare has 69 traffic light-controlled intersections in the CBD.
Ahead of the
44th SADC Heads of State and Government Summit last year, 31 were upgraded. Yet
others were decommissioned when roads were dualised.
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