A tale of an accident survivor

He cheated death by a whisker when the commuter taxi he was manning as the conductor was crushed to a mass of debris by a 30-tonne truck at a Mabira Forest accident.

As the taxi rolled down the ditch, Richard Ochieng, the sole survivor of the horrific road accident in Mabira Forest, lost all his reflexes and does not remember at what point he escaped the collision, writes Pauline Kairu.

He cheated death by a whisker when the commuter taxi he was manning as the conductor was crushed to a mass of debris by a 30-tonne truck at a Mabira Forest accident. The first reports went that everybody on board had perished. Not even Richard Ochieng, the sole survivor of the horrific road accident believes his luck.

The accident occurred when the speeding tipper reg no. UAM 905B conveying cement from Tororo Cement Factory to Kampala hit their stationary taxi reg no. UAG 100R pushing it into a ditch and then plunging behind it before smashing it into splinters underneath its weight, also crushing all seven occupants to a pulp, except Ochieng. “Up to now, I don’t know how I came out of it alive,” the 33-year-old father of four said during an interview, about the November 12, 2009 accident. The seemingly fright-stricken Ochieng says everyone in the Jinja bound taxi saw it coming.

The accident happened after the yet-to-be-identified driver of the truck failed to heed to a red flag at a portion of the road that was being marked by contractors. The truck driver is blamed for drunken driving.
“The flagman used every effort to stop him, flagging him and waving both arms, yelling at him and doing all in his power to stop him. But he just sped on like a mad man,” a now incensed Ochieng narrates, saying it is unfortunate that it later turned out that the driver and his co-driver had half-full bottles of beer in their cabin suggesting that they might have been drinking. Ochieng narrates that the truck zigzagged down the 100 metres gradual stretch, preceding the scene of the accident at Lugalambo before veering off the road and slamming into them, head-on.
“We had been stopped by the contractors as well,” he explains. “What was amazing is that despite realisation of their horrible predicament, and the imminent crash, in the flash of the interval between the realisation and the incident all the passengers just went dead quiet as if they had been sedated,” he recollects that the only one who spoke was the driver, Musa Mukasa, who said, “We are finished,” before the hard crash sounded.

Others who perished in the twilight accident, include: Innocent Murera of Kabale, Rita Nassali of Lugazi, Rita Cheptoyek, a police officer at Jinja Police Station and two unidentified bodies that were disfigured beyond recognition.

The narrow escape
As the taxi was shoved and rolled down the ditch, Ochieng probably lost all his reflexes as he says he does not know at what point he escaped the collision.

The door was locked, he says so he probably fell out through the window as the taxi rolled down the ditch. He terms it a miracle from heaven.
All he knows is what the good Samaritans who rushed him to hospital in Jinja recounted to him.

“A gentleman who was with me at the hospital until I regained consciousness said they had picked me from underneath the truck, near its tyres,” he narrates, although he says he can’t relate the moments after the crash and his waking up on a hospital bed. Other than a few bruises on his face and some swelling and pain in his neck, Ochieng says he feels normal although just one look at him tells the story of a grief stricken young man.

Returning to the road
I am sure this man is not yet over with the shock from the accident, because as we alighted off the taxi in which we travelled to Lugazi Police station for him to make a statement, Ochieng turned to wish the travellers a safe journey. This was his first long journey in a vehicle since the accident.

The owner of the ill-fated taxi Moses Ssenyonjo who also accompanied us to the police station says, “as a matter of fact it was not expected that anybody could have survived the accident. We had thought everybody aboard must have died! It was not a pretty sight,” he tells of the crush in which his vehicle was reduced into tangled mass of wheels, rods, twisted steel and upholstering.

The lucky survivor who has been a conductor of matatus plying the Kampala-Jinja route for 14 years now believes God had a grand purpose for him to live and is determined to live a purposeful life from here on.
“You don’t just survive from such things,” Ochieng who is also a driver by profession says.

Asked if he plans on going back into the same business, he looks far into the distance and answers, “All my life, this is all I have known how to do. If I got another job that would ably feed my family, I definitely would not go back but I don’t know what else I can do,” he says, before he regains control. He asks, “If I were a farmer and I cut my leg while digging, would it be an excuse to abandon my garden entirely?”