Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage Minister, Kazembe Kazembe, has said a pilot smart traffic management project done in Harare recently showed that at least 1 000 traffic crimes were committed in less than two hours on a single stretch of road.

Kazembe made the revelations while speaking at the 2022 Senior Officers Conference this week. He said:

There was a company that came and did some demonstration to show how traffic management works and the pilot project which was done along Samora Machel road to show how many traffic offences were being committed every hour. Surprisingly there were 1 000 violations in two hours out of 2 500 vehicles.

That’s almost 50% on one road only between 2 O’clock and 4 O’clock. So we can safely say just in Harare alone, there is a possibility of making US$100 000 in one hour if we charge these traffic offenders.

Kazembe said the government intends to fully implement real-time electronic monitoring of roads, and receipting and reconciliation of fines to curb traffic crimes. He said:

This was approved by the Cabinet which will see the three departments; police, immigration and civil Registry integrated on one platform.

Everything will be computerised, it will make it easy for us to detect crime and it will bring efficiency into our service delivery. It will also bring revenue.

The system that we are talking about is going to be deployed and I promise you that by the time we get to April-June next year, we will be having this system in the country.

The cameras will automatically detect traffic offences such as drinking while driving and so on.

Once we deploy these, police won’t bother you on the roads because their welfare will be well taken care of.

They won’t have any reason to be asking for money at roadblocks as the system will now be bringing revenue.

So this is the route that we are going to take and it’s unavoidable.

| NewsDay