Out of chaos rose opportunities

In early March this year, Minister of Transport and Public Works Francis Kasaila raised his hands about the endemic corruption at the Directorate of Road Traffic and Safety Services (DRTSS) in a manner that was distressing as it was comical.

“It’s quite sad that everyone at that directorate, including messengers, has become the boss who can issue driving licences or certificates of fitness,” said Kasaila.

Four months on, messengers may not be issuing licences or CoFs but the chaos that bred corruption then has not taken leave of the directorate.

In fact, so bad have they become that Bishop Martin Mtumbuka of Karonga Diocese last Saturday lamented the chaos that have become DRTSS’s modus operandi since government announced, with fanfare and fancifully in hindsight, the installation of Malawi Traffic Information System (Maltis)—an instrument it dreamed would deal with corruption and introduce efficiency.

DRTSS contends it is middlemen, not its own voluntary incompetence, which is at the root of the chaos. The middlemen, DRTSS argues, have gone wild swindling unsuspecting people and disappeared. It is the swindled service seekers who have thus swelled the crowds at its offices, in the hope of meeting one of the middlemen. Quite an ingenious explanation—if only that were half true! If those people are victims of conmen, what is the police for if not for such incidents?

While conmen might be on rampage, DRTSS problems go deeper and are multifaceted than just a few frustrated middlemen who have had their golden goose killed with the installation of Maltis.

For starters, those so-called middlemen were not acting in isolation; they had collaborators within DRTSS, its own employees. Those employees stand to lose as much as the middlemen if Maltis does what it is hoped it would do.

It is a point Kasaila made some months ago when he said some DRTSS officers were as much to blame as anything else. Of course, with that knowledge, one would have expected Kasaila to have invited some government agencies—the police and the Anti Corruption Bureau—to clean up the system. The fact that he did nothing should be indicative of the challenges lying ahead. Anyone expecting him or the government to act on the corrupt officers at DRTSS would have better luck hoping Malawi would win the Fifa World Cup in 2018.

A few years ago, this paper carried out two sting investigations. In one, a journalist managed to have a buggered up car issued with a certificate of fitness. In another, someone with no driving experience was able to obtain a drivers’ licence. You would have expected that to have led to sweeping changes at DRTSS. But nothing happened.

The consequences of that lackadaisical approach have been dire, but maybe the challenge has been that no one has done research to find out how many deaths or damage to property could have been prevented had DRTSS’s employees been diligent about their work, and not inspired by a few pieces of silver.

For instance, a day before Mtumbuka made that lament, hundreds of kilometres away in Nkhotakota, Blessings Nguluwe, was hit to death by a truck. According to police records, the accident was the eighth fatality in Nkhotakota this year alone.

Drivers, more often than not, receive all the flak when accidents involving deaths or injuries to pedestrians occur. Mostly for the right reasons.

But maybe instead of blaming the drivers, isn’t it time we found out how these people obtained their licences? Everyone I know knows someone who obtained their licence on Sunday—a euphemism that, in its simplicity, encapsulates the endemic corruption at DRTSS. Getting a Sunday licence is easy—hassle-free but expensive.

That is the system DRTSS has cultivated that cannot just be wished away even with the installation of Maltis. Those folks at the DRTSS care less about how good one can be on the road than about their own well-being.

I can understand Bishop Mtumbuka’s frustration but the guys at DRTSS are neither incompetent nor improperly educated. Nor do I think Maltis is fried. The changeover has provided a fertile ground to make a quick buck. Corruption thrives where there is impatience and chaos. Out of chaos rises corruption, chaos breeds opportunities.