#theaccident

A mobile phone rings. No-one answers the call. The owner cannot hear it. He is dead.

A few paces away, someone is groaning, “I want to sit up, I want to sit up uuuiiiii, uuuuuiiii!”

Rescuers are pulling bodies from a taxi that has been crushed to nearly a quarter its size. There’s a man’s body hanging out of the front left window of the vehicle. He is not wearing a shirt, and his green underpants are on display. The taxi’s mouth is stuck in the front of a trailer which it rammed into headlong.

The accident has just happened at Kitigoma in Buikwe district, along the Jinja-Kampala highway on 15th March. Police says it happened around 8:30pm. The policeman at the scene has scanty information. He says that there were “two taxis, one heading to Mbale, the other to Busia, as they were climbing towards Kitigoma …it is said that the Fuso truck loaded with materials for... from Bidco lost control, rammed into the taxis and dragged them off the road. 13 people were rescued from vehicles…nine ‘dead’ bodies were retrieved from the wreckage… waiting for a crane to pull the taxi out of the truck so that they get to know how many remained in the taxi.”
He suspects that the truck had a mechanical problem of sorts. Then he starts praising Operation Fika Salama and its effectiveness and the “traffic deployment everywhere”.


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At the hospital, the man who had been yelling in agony has arrived, on the back of a pickup that was being driven crazily. His head is dangerously balanced on the tailgate.

Another man is lying on a cot in his back. He holds his left hand in his right. Something must be broken. The mattress is bare. His pink shirt is stained with blood, there are spots on the arms and the chest. The nurses have put cotton wool in his right ear.

Journalists and their prying cameras and notebooks are badgering him with questions. “Where were you going?” “What happened?” He answers in between his cries. Anything to make him forget his suffering. “Adjust me! Somebody, please!! Make me sit upright.” He jabs at his chest. “The chest is paining, the chest is paining, the chest is paining! Yesu!”

A young woman has cotton wool plastered on the bridge of her nose. She is sobbing uncontrollably. Her white vest is splotched with blood.

Someone else lies on a cot, staring into space. His belt has been loosened. The mattress is about to fall off.

Another person stands close by, helplessly, quiet as he watches the goings-on. He suddenly moves as the man with the chest injuries man bursts into loud tears. It must be the the trauma, the memory. He says it happened so fast.

A few meters away, an elderly man, blood all over his hands, sits on a plastic chair, talking on a mobile phone. He must be recounting the incident to his relatives, telling them that that he is well. He licks his lips as he talks.

The light in the ward is dim. The nurses are overwhelmed. There are no doctors in sight. Some of the cots have no mattresses. The floor has holes in many places, the cement has come loose and causes it to look dusty.

Outside the hospital, the mayhem continues. Sirens, flashing lights on police vehicles ferrying in the injured. Volunteers, without gloves, helping to carry people from the backs of the trucks. They don’t use stretchers.

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Then we hear that a Member of Parliament is among those who were killed and people start arguing about why an Honorable was sitting in a taxi when he was given nearly 100 million shillings of tax-payers' money to buy a new car.