Road Traffic Directorate in North Malawi awareness campaign for Kabaza

Directorate of Road Traffic and Safety Services (DRTSS) has embarked on an awareness campaign to inform motorbike taxi operators  – known as Kabaza – in the northern region to ensure they acquire the Directorate’s valid documents.

The campaign follows frequent fatal accidents on the country’s roads, which commentators have attributed to operators without valid road traffic documentation.

The region’s Principal Road Traffic Officer, Joseph Chisambe said many accidents happen because users do not have driver’s licences and other road permit documents.

“In the wake of this, we have decided to start civic educating road users, especially motorbike taxi operators, to come to our offices and acquire road traffic documents so that we avoid some of the accidents.

“A lot of people have of late flooded Mzuzu City and various districts in the region with motorbikes but do not possess relevant documentation to allow them to operate on the country’s roads; this is unacceptable,” he said.

Chisambe added that some people have just bought motorbikes with no proper documents, and some are even operating them without necessarily having knowledge on how to use them.

“Some of these road accidents could be avoided if people first acquired the knowledge on how to ride a motorbike and register them with us.

“We have a lot of motorbikes and vehicles that as a Directorate we have not assessed them to be on the roads. This is the reason we are now embarking on this massive awareness campaign to ask the operators to register with us,” he said.

The Principal Road Traffic Officer said motorbike taxis which do not have valid registration pose security risk to both owners and the public at large.

“In the absence of road traffic documentation, the country risks having a lot of hit-and-run cases which are difficult to trace since perpetrators know for sure that they are not registered.

“Even when these motorbikes are stolen, it becomes extremely difficult to trace them because they are not in our records,” he said.

The Directorate would visit all the six districts in the northern region and after some time, they would start confiscating those that have not taken hid of the directorate’s plea.

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