This article examines the request strategies in commuter omnibus discourse involving the bus crew (conductors, touts and drivers and passengers, in Harare The present study considers requests in commuter transport as face threatening acts (FTA), hence the need, for the commuter crew to strategical shape their communicative actions to achieve their overall discourse goal of getting passengers to perform actions that are in their own interest with minimum resistance or confrontation. The crew present itself by using communicative devices that prompt the passengers to evaluate it positively as warm, friendly, modest and respectful. However, the passengers' responses to the requests range from compliance to resistance depending on their interpretation of the speaker's motive and the probable social consequences.
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