REFLECTIONS : Are we safe from these Toyota malfunctions?

Aren’t we in Rwanda lucky? Just imagine: the way Japanese vehicles are hijacking Rwandan roads in increasingly swelling numbers, suppose all of them were these hybrid-fuelled vehicles I hear of? They’d plunge us into a second genocide, no doubt about it. If you’ve watched Rwandan roads, you’ve seen that there is no second that goes by without a Toyota vehicle whizzing by. If it is not a Toyota Coaster minibus commandeering passengers to their different destinations, it will be a Toyota Hiace minibus packing off its own load of commuters. Meanwhile, a Toyota Landcruiser will be competing with a Toyota Fourunner, a Toyota Rav4, a Toyota Carina or an aging Toyota Corolla, in coasting loads of passengers down the hills of Kigali, and Rwanda generally, at the highest speeds. You see, the rising fortunes of Rwandans have seen a boom of vehicles that have taken Rwandan roads hostage. Gone are the days when old men played their ‘Umweso’/‘igisoro’ (translation?) game, or toddlers honed their driving skills, on the roads….. You know the improvised toy-vehicles of these kids, the ones whose driving rods jut out of the main body-frame and reach the kids’ torsos….. Today, added to the few vehicles that had made those roads a kind of pleasure resorts, this additional outrageous number of mostly second-hand vehicles is a menace not only to the drivers and their passengers but also to innocent people unconnected with the road. Yes, government has played its part and rid all roads of potholes and made side-walks for pedestrians. However, in the short span of 15 years, it cannot be expected to have gathered the capacity to make tunnels under hills, and build bridges over valleys, so as to avoid bends in roads. In hilly Rwanda, therefore, you find roads that are overhanging on cliffs while jittery houses are standing underneath and praying that there is no overzealous driver who will overshoot the road. Unfortunately, the inevitable often happens and the result has been loss of innocent lives. Take the case of Raymond Rugendo. One night he and his family are sleeping cosily after a long session of TV-watching for the parents when they hear “Bang!”, followed by the noise of breaking glass. Rugendo immediately shoots out of bed to investigate, only to be greeted by the glare of two powerful torches. Sure that it is a case of ‘Gatarina’, he ducks back into the dark bedroom and waits….. The ‘Gatarina’ cases in Uganda used to be where burglars hurled large rocks against doors, with the aid of a sack, so as to break into houses. As any other form of burglary, these are alien to Rwanda but how is Rugendo to be sure?.... Sure enough, however, nothing happens and Rugendo ventures out to resume investigation. He attempts to open the middle door, but finds it can’t budge. Assured now that it is not a burglary, he calls out to dear wife to have no fear and go round the house through the back door. On reaching the front, however, dear wife screams out: “Oh, Bikiramariya na Yezu we! Where is our sitting room?” Rugendo bolts out through the back, too, but on reaching the front he sees a lorry where the sitting room used to be! A lorry has overshot the road and has replaced the sitting room. Those ‘torches’ were the headlights of the lorry.Raymond Rugendo and wife, and sleeping children, thus escaped death narrowly. However, many other families and houses have not been that lucky. Many are the times when lorries have ploughed into houses and razed them down, killing all their sleeping occupants. When we are saddled with these problems already, do we want a Toyota vehicle whose driver’s rubber mat interferes with the accelerator pedal, added on our road? I don’t want to think of what would happen if a driver’s accelerator pedal refused to go back when he reaches that bend on the cliff. If you’ve been following news in the media lately, you’ve been hearing how Toyota Company has been forced to withdraw some of its models from the market. This is because those vehicles have been found defective in their breaking and acceleration systems. Luckily for us all, these are futuristic vehicles that have not yet considered honouring our 19th-century African continent with their presence. I doubt if even South Africa or Egypt have seen these vehicles that are fuelled partly by petrol and partly by electricity. Suppose you are driving your trailer, or even ‘samuturera’ (semi-trailer!), down Shyorongi Hill and when you touch your break pedals it’s like stepping on water. Or, when you remove your foot, the accelerator pedal continues as if you were coaxing it to go down farther! When you think of the unfairness of the inequalities of the world, and then you think of the advantages sometimes derived thereof, that’s when you start to believe that maybe there is a super-human force somewhere levelling things out. And then you begin to think that maybe you should be saying: “Alleluia!” ingina2@yahoo.co.uk