Buckle up, it may save your life

The seatbelt prevents you from hitting the dashboard or another passenger, and also stops you from being thrown from the car. STOCK Photo

What you need to know:

Seatbelts are designed to act upon an object (your body), that is in motion. Without a seatbelt, your body continues forward after the car stops and you may hit something

Kenneth Mujuni considers himself a walking miracle. While October 19, 2018 could have been any other normal day to many, he recalls it as one that drew a very thin line between life and death.
Seated behind a steering wheel of a Toyota Mark II, driving at 130 kilometres per hour between Lwengo and Mbarara on a straight stretch where he could view at least two kilometres ahead, a cow emerged from nowhere.
“As I stepped on the brake to avoid ramming into the cow, I saw a herdsman following it. The cow and the herdsman were less than 10 metres from the car yet I was approaching them. I found myself in a situation where I could not control the car and veered off the road,” Mujuni recalls.
“The car overturned a number of times and I thought it was the end of my life. I think what saved me was the seatbelt I was wearing. When the car eventually stopped after ramming into an anthill, I had to cut the seatbelt because it had got defunct,” Mujuni says, adding that I survived the accident with minor injuries.
Patrick Odong also recalls surviving a head-on collision with a truck on Bweyale road in 2016. No sooner had he overtaken a slow trailer in a valley-like spot than a speeding trailer from oncoming traffic emerged from a slope from the opposite side of the road.
“After viewing ahead and ensuring there was no vehicle from oncoming traffic, a trailer which I think was driving at a similar speed came from nowhere. I struggled to control my car between the trailer and the truck in the middle of the road. The side of the driver was severely scratched by the truck. I did not have the seatbelt on and I hit the chest on the steering wheel and the forehead on the dashboard,” Odong recalls, adding that he survived with internal bleeding and severe chest pain.
It is common to find motorists on the road driving without seatbelts. There is also a category of those who only wear them on sight of traffic or police officers or a checkpoint ahead of them, or when they know positions where traffic checkpoints are mounted. When they drive past the checkpoint, the seatbelt becomes useless.
Odong says he remembered to use the seatbelt when the truck approached him. At this point, a number of things were running through his mind. Not only did he struggle to control the car with the right hand but he also fidgeted to look for the seatbelt with the left hand. At the same time, he also thought of braking instantly, but then, the trailer he had just overtaken was also picking up speed. He also thought of directing the car into the roadside gardens but there lay a wide water trench.
Charles Ssebambulidde, the spokesperson of the traffic directorate, says much as there has not been recorded or registered road accidents as a result of not using seatbelts, the directorate is able to determine the nature of the accident. “We cannot tell whether a motorist or vehicle involved in an accident was wearing their seatbelt or not. But if it is an accident where there was impact and the motorist or the co-driver or both were ejected out of the car through the windscreen, it means they never had their seatbelts on,” Ssebambulidde explains.
Some of the common accidents where motorist and co-drivers are ejected from the car through windscreen include head-on collisions or when a vehicle has overturned.

Importance
Most, if not all private cars come fitted with functional seatbelts. In the unlikely event that your car gets involved in an accident, Ssebambulidde clarifies that a seatbelt plays an important role of keeping you stationary in the driver or co-driver’s seat. If you are driving at 100 kilometres per hour, if you are avoiding a head-on collision, you will be ejected out of your car at the same speed and velocity at which you were or are driving,” he says.
According to your mechanic, an online portal, seat belts are devices that have been proven to save lives. For your own safety and the safety of your passengers, you should enforce a rule in your vehicle that every occupant wears their seat belt at all times.