We should endeavour to err on the side of caution

The business district in Blantyre City has a number of roads which have been designated for one-way passage. It was surprising, therefore, to see a motorcyclist going in the wrong direction, against the flow of traffic, on the Victoria Avenue one day. Besides, the motorcyclist did not bother to wear a helmet.

Our motorcyclists have developed the bad habit of going on the road without helmets. Not just helmets for themselves, but also for their passengers! The occasional motorcylist who wears a helmet is, in fact, the exception rather than the rule.

I recently attended a workshop at a venue in Dedza. Travelling by coach from Blantyre, my drop-off point was the roadblock just before Dedza Town. I, therefore, needed to take local transport to the venue of the workshop. As it turned out, the only mode of transport that could carry me to the workshop venue was a motorbike.

“Do you have a helmet for yourself and for me?” I asked. True to my expectation, the operator did not have any.

“I will be going slowly,” he said.

Helmets are insisted on for a reason. It is not for the traffic officers or for government that those travelling by motorbike are required to wear helmets. It is for the safety of the riders themselves.

My son spent some time on internship at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. When he was in the Surgery Department, he reported a number of cases where patients’ heads needed to be opened up. Opening up a patient’s head is by no means a simple procedure.  It is performed only when it is absolutely necessary to do so. A good number of such patients would have sustained head injuries in motorbike accidents because they had been riding without wearing a helmet.

People still flout the rule despite being aware of the potential danger associated with riding a motorbike without a helmet. The thinking is like, ‘I cannot possibly be involved in an accident; not me, but the other people’.

This is a big problem in Malawi, and it is not limited to motorbikes. There are many areas where people do not take the necessary precautions because they somehow think nothing will go wrong. Few people, for example, consider it necessary to wear helmets when visiting construction sites. When part of Kamuzu Stadium was declared unfit for carrying people, not everyone was convinced that sitting on those stands was tantamount to committing suicide; after all, no cracks were seen on the pillars supporting those stands.

What matters in situations like the ones described above is not what one is able to observe or how one feels, but rather the considered opinion of the experts. We need to heed of such opinion and advice because it is better to err on the side of caution than not to take any precaution and end up in a terrible situation.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown how careless Malawians can be insofar as ignoring the advice of experts is concerned. Many people ignore wily-nily the precautionary measures that are supposed to be followed, thinking that nothing will go wrong. Most rural dwellers, actually, believe that Covid-19 is an urban problem, which they are somehow immune to. Some people believe that it is a problem only for the rich.

Covid-19 vaccination is not only ignored but, actually, resisted by the majority of Malawians. The reasons for the resistance vary from scientific through religious to mystic ones. Most of them are based on misinformation or pure manufacturing of scenarios that do not exist.

I heard, for example, a narration to the effect that the Covid-19 vaccine was impreginated with electrolytes that would cause the injected persons to be on  the radar of some powerful people who would control their movements like we control television sets with remote control units. Funny, though, this may sound, some people believe it. Another version of the story claims that the vaccines can alter one’s genetic make-up to make them a zombie-like creature. There is no shortage of stories designed to bad mouth Covid-19 vaccine.

Some are scared of the vaccine because of the rare health problems associated with it that have been reported in some parts of the world. These stories are more plausible than the ones about electrolytes or altered genetics. At the end of the day, it is a question of probability. The probability that one would develop the reported problems is close to zero, but the probability that one will get infected by Covid-19, and perhaps fatally so, if one is not vaccinated, is significantly higher.