The hell that is parking in Blantyre

My visitor and I were hard pressed for time. I had to rush him to the coach terminal, to get there in time so that he would not miss the 4:30 pm coach. On getting there, we were boorishly prevented from entering the premises.

“The coach is coming very soon. It needs some room for some maneuvering and parking, so you cannot enter the parking lot,” said an overenthusiastic female guard.

We were instead directed to a congested dead end of the road. Before long, that portion of the road got so heavily crammed that we could go neither forward nor backward. In the meantime, the coach approached, but was caught in the ensuing traffic jam and consequently made very slow progress to the space reserved for it, which space the overtly passionate lady guard had done everything to shelter from “unwanted” traffic.

“What a way to treat customers,” I thought to myself. If ever there had been customer service anywhere in Malawi, this was not it. I remembered what my former general manager had said many years earlier: if a customer says “jump”, you don’t respond by asking “why?” Rather, your response should be, “how high, sir/madam?” Yet at this coach terminal, customers were being subjected to all manner of torturous conditions.

I felt sorry for myself, my visitor, the battalion of guards at the gate but more so for the coach operator. They were in a very awkward situation, given the scarcity of parking space in the central business district of Blantyre, or rather given the many vehicles that roam Blantyre City Centre and fiercely compete for parking space.

When I first came to Blantyre in 1979, vehicles were so few that you could count them on your fingers and drivers would park anywhere they wanted. Since then the number of vehicles has increased perhaps fifty-fold but the available parking space has remained essentially constant. Today, to spot unoccupied parking lot within the city centre during the day is next to mission impossible. If you are picking up somebody and if they do not get to the agreed place in time, you must be prepared to drive round and round some route, for want of parking space.

All this is compounded by the fact that a number of organizations that operate from the city centre normally reserve certain parking lots for their staff. They do so by placing plastic beacons on the parking lots warning wandering motorists that those lots are not available. It is not a joy any more to drive around in Blantyre.

Blantyre is ruled by parking-lords, much like Mogadishu is ruled by warlords. Ordinary citizens are total strangers in the central business district during normal working hours. The situation eases up somewhat over the weekend, but come Monday the park-lords reign supreme again. It goes on and on, week in and week out.

This cannot go on forever. We have to find a permanent solution to the grisly congestion of our cities. I would humbly suggest that the authorities should have it on their by-laws that property developers must be required to construct a parking lot as part of their property. The parking lot should be attached to the property. Every commercial building within the city centre must have its parking area within the building, probably located below ground level if they cannot have it elsewhere. New structures should not be approved unless provision has been made for parking space within the building. As for existing buildings, the owners should be required to retro-fit parking lots to them by a certain deadline. Our engineers need to be challenged to come up with feasible and relatively low priced designs for such retrofits. I am certain that they would love to be stretched to such limits and they would not hesitate to tax their resourceful brains to create solutions to the challenges of modern Malawi.

These days I avoid going into Blantyre’s Central Business District for fear of finding no parking space. If I can transatct any business outside the cbd, I will happily do that, and leave the central area to the parking-lords.

Solutions to our problems will not come from Mars or from the next galactic neighbourhood. We have to search within our human resource and our by-laws to concoct such solutions. It is obvious that we cannot continue to let park-lords call the shots in our city centres while the ordinary motorist is like unwanted chaff. Left as it is, the situation will get worse than it currently is, which is why plans to address the congestion need to be executed, and executed now.