The Red Light: When Accountability Stops at the Top

Tendai drives a school omnibus along Samora Machel Avenue. He stops at red lights. Most mornings he is the only one who does.

Last week a black SUV with tinted

windows, no siren and no escort, went through the junction. Two motorbikes followed. Then a taxi. Then Tendai's conductor asked, in Shona, who would catch them.

Tendai did not need an answer. Everyone at that junction already had one. We are told we have become undisciplined. Pitch invasions. Stampedes at stadium gates. Vandalised bus shelters. Litter in every drain. The sermon is familiar, and it lands on the wrong people. Discipline is not a personality trait. It is a response to consequence. People obey where they expect to be caught and ignore where they expect to be excused.

Take Gate 2 at the National Sports Stadium. Ahead of the AFCON qualifier between Zimbabwe and the DRC, a crowd surged, a stampede followed, and one person died. After the match, fans breached the perimeter and poured onto the pitch. The easy word for it was hooliganism.

A stampede is rarely a crowd deciding to get hurt. It is usually a gate that cannot hold the numbers sent to it, a ticket count that does not match the turnstiles, and a security plan nobody owns. A perimeter is rarely breached by enthusiasm alone. It gives way where it is thin. Who answers for the gate is the part that tends to go quiet.

The citizen watches upward. The law says traffic gives way to emergency vehicles and motorcades. A rule that grants precedence to some is only as good as its policing, and at the junction nobody can tell the entitled from the merely connected. The privilege is lawful. Abusing it is not, and abuse is rarely tested. Reports are tabled and too often shelved. Resignations are rare. Explanations are rarer. The citizen concludes that enforcement is a tax on people without contacts.

Vandalism follows the same logic. A person who believes the bus shelter belongs to nobody will treat it that way, and public property looks abandoned when officials treat it as abandoned.

None of this excuses the man who runs the red light. Individuals still choose. But a country cannot lecture its way to order while exempting its leaders from the same rules. Accountability that only travels downward is not accountability. It is control. Inquiry findings would be public. Officials would be charged as quickly as vendors. Road precedence would belong only to those the law names, and everyone else would stop.

Tendai still stops at red lights. Last Friday he stopped alone. He says he is running out of reasons.

Simbarashe Namusi is a media expert writing in his personal capacity.

Accountability in Zimbabwe