Why Ethiopia should stop calling road crashes “Accidents”

The night of May 30, 2026 was an important night for football fans across the globe. English Premiership champions Arsenal battled French League One Champions Paris Saint Germain for the UEFA Champions League final.  This match had a particularly high anticipation in Addis Ababa where there is a large Arsenal fan base.

The week of May 24 was filled with promotions by bars offering different types of amenities and comfort from which people can watch the game. Around late afternoon on Saturday the 30^th, the town’s bars were filled with spectators – devoted fans praying for an Arsenal victory, and rivals eagerly wishing for their downfall. Some Arsenal fans would have you believe the latter account for every football fan outside Arsenal fans – a sentiment that, while statistically unverified, certainly felt true in the electric atmosphere of the city.

I had elected to watch the game at home with family. The game was fantastic, food for the eyes really. When the game ended, I had to take some relatives who were watching the game with me to their home. It was inevitable that the roads would be chaotic after such a football night. I expected jams and intoxicated pedestrians. 

The trip from my home to my relatives’ and back took around thirty minutes. In those thirty minutes, however, I witnessed three traffic “accidents”. The first one was on my way forth, when I noticed, two cars had collided front-to-rear; the front of the rear vehicle had been damaged extensively. The two drivers bickered near a traffic police officer who was studying the different sides of the cars and their vicinities, while another policeman sporting a rifle watched with slight amusement in his face.

I stumbled upon the second “accident” on my way back; this one featured a car that had slammed head-on into a bridge barrier. The damage to the front of this car was much bigger; the windshield and window mirrors showed breakage and cracks, while the airbags had popped out. I lamented that a night of an exciting football game had ended this way for someone.

By this time, I had thought I’d seen the end of it. Alas! A third one; and quite the shock it was! A man laid flat on his belly in the middle of one lane; he had no visible wounds at first glance, but I could see he was unable to move from the waist down. He waved his hands and spoke with what I could detect from a distance was a very angry tone to police officers and a number of passersby surrounding him. Sitting in the ensuing jam, I heard more people joining the crowd speak of a hit-and-run.

These tragic scenes are playing out daily across Ethiopia, framed by the public and media alike as unavoidable “accidents.” But modern traffic science tells a completely different story—one of predictable chains of events that we have the power to break.

Luckily, I got home safe. However, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I saw. At least three families will now be affected; their lives altered in proportion to the injuries inflicted upon their loved ones. What troubled me most was not only the crashes themselves, but how predictably they would be discussed the next morning. I thought – Tomorrow there would be news on how many traffic “accidents” occurred the night before; the audience would be told how big a hazard traffic “accidents” have become and then it will be another ordinary day. No details on the victims, no in-depth look at the commonalities and differences between the events that led to a serious injury and significant property damage.  

The narrative and the level of seriousness with which “traffic accidents” are treated in the media space had long remained unchanged. True – there are a number of road and traffic related programs, particularly on the radio; true – print media dedicate articles to road traffic safety whenever there is a story every now and then. But the contents of media work covering road safety need to change fundamentally to reflect the gold standard in the science of road traffic safety today which is underpinned the pioneering works of public health experts like William Haddon and embedded in successful road safety strategies such as Sweden’s Vision Zero.

The term “accident” can unintentionally reinforce the idea that crashes are unavoidable acts of chance rather than preventable events shaped by human and systemic factors. However, this is very much removed from what the study of “accidents” in general and road traffic safety in particular tell us.

Indeed, science does not deny there could be random, or probabilistic components to crashes. However, science tells us that “accidents” are caused by a number of systemic faults, which come together like a chain of events to lead to a crash. Take any one of the three tragic events that I described earlier and think about how speeding, driving distracted by the use of mobile phones, alcohol consumption, the rainy evening that impeded quick braking, and poorly lit street sections could have contributed to the crashes. Thus, one may conclude that the combination of any of these factors may have formed the chain of events that led from safety to tragedy.

Hence, reducing the prevalence of these systemic risk factors can significantly reduce the likelihood and severity of crashes. This is indeed the beautiful part of this “chain-of-events model” to conceptualize crashes; because the chain can be broken by addressing individual risk factors in it. 

Globally, road traffic crashes claim around 1.2 million lives in a year per WHO’s global road safety status report of 2023. Ethiopia’s share of fatalities is well above twenty thousand in the same report, though official government statistics lower this number to around four thousand. 

 A big part of mitigating this national tragedy is changing the narrative on road traffic safety. It is imperative that the media space embraces the terminology of crashes instead of accidents. In this regard, I am not giving a dogmatic prescription for the local media – I’m not a linguist.  What I argue for, rather, is the use of proper wording that indicates the intentionality embedded in traffic safety problems – the intentional speeding, the intentional delay or dodging of annual vehicle inspections, the intentional corruption in driver-licensing procedures, the intentional alcohol consumption, the underinvestment in capacitating the traffic police force, and so forth.

All of the above systemic ills make us party to the daily tragedy on Ethiopia’s roads. The media can play a pivotal role in changing societal understanding of crashes, thereby instilling in society a much-needed attitude of agency over matters of traffic safety.

Small shifts in vocabulary can serve as seeds of change towards a wider media strategy to communicate road traffic safety issues in a scientifically honest and societally helpful manner.