Our intra city public transport is dogged by many problems— unreliable schedules, arrogance of operators on the roads, ugly scramble for passengers, among others. As a result, city dwellers only use public transport when all other options are not available.
Two particularly bad experiences with minibus operators stand out in my mind. The first one involved public transport between Limbe and Zomba. I had an appointment in Zomba and decided to travel by minibus. My instinct told me that the right place to catch the bus from was just before the rail level crossing on the road to Zomba from Limbe. I waited for about ten minutes and one called in to pick passengers travelling to Zomba. Full of excitement, I jumped on. My excitement waned soon after starting off, as we only drove as far as the filling station about 100 metres away before the driver decided to drive back to the bus stands at Limbe Market, where minibuses going to destinations outside Limbe originate from, in search of more Zomba passengers. The operators would surely pick up more passengers along the way, but in their reasoning, it was better to fill up the bus in Limbe. We waited for some time at the bus stands for bus to fill. By the time we got to Zomba, I was late for my appointment.
A year or so later, I decided to drive from Blantyre Mission to Makata Industrial Site. With Makata road closed for renovation works, I thought driving through Masauko Chipembere Highway then connecting to the upper end of Makata Road at Kamuzu Stadium would be a bit of a stretch, so I decided to drive through Ndirande.
As it turned out, I had made a terrible mistake. Getting to the central market at Ndirande, time literally froze. Countless minibuses had parked on one side of the road, letting passing vehicles use a single lane. To add insult to injury, one minibus driver stopped his vehicle and parked it on the lone free lane to let passengers get on and off it, holding up all the traffic behind him. Five minutes later, as we were still trying to figure out what the problem could have been, the parked minibus started to reverse into an area where other minibuses were parked on the left side of the road, causing more disturbance and obviously more delay.
I ended up showing up for my appointment at Makata ten minutes late. This was a bother to me but certainly not to the minibus driver, not in the least. Time meant next to nothing to him and to most other minibus drivers. That is how arrogant our public transport operators can be.
We have a long way to go before we can boast a decent intra-city transport service. And yet that is what we need to be on top of our fuel woes. If more people switched to public transport, there would be less vehicles on our roads, a situation that would lead to a significant reduction in Malawi’s fuel consumption. Use of personal vehicles by commuters between home and office or between home and shopping areas is not necessary, except by those who have a propensity to dabble in the flamboyance of showing off. A member of a WhatsApp forum I belong to posted a picture showing push bikes that ministers of a certain country had used to get to a place where they were having a meeting. This is a country that has no issues with fuel, yet its ministers choose to travel by bike. If they had not used bikes they probably would have used trams, public transport.
Some company recently intimated that they would introduce cityline buses in Lilongwe. This was to happen, we were told, by the end of July. I have not checked to find out whether it has materialised but what I know is that this would be a welcome development by all well-meaning citizens of Lilongwe City. Obviously, minibus operators would do everything possible to block or sabotage the introduction of an alternative city wide public transport service.
As a nation, we would win on more than one front by the introduction of decent public transport systems in our cities. As already pointed out, switching from personal vehicles to public transport would result in reduced demand on fuel. Additionally, this would decongest our heavily congested city roads. It is currently a nightmare to drive on Blantyre’s and Lilongwe’s major roads during peak hours but the introduction of a decent public transport service would change this situation. Lastly, s witching to public transport would reduce the nation’s carbon footprint
Discussion about this post