A love affair with speed
One of the sad facts about South Africa is that whenever it comes to the festive season at the end of the year or the Easter Weekend towards the middle of the year, we brace ourselves for the reports when we return to work telling us how many people died on the roads during the periods in question.
This year was no different. While we are all no doubt hoping for a festive season where 1 714 deaths were recorded on South African roads over the festive season; more recently, road carnage reared its ugly head again.
FAnews recently did a newsletter on this topic.
The RAF weighs in
The Road Accident Fund (RAF) CEO, Dr Eugene Watson, points out that this statistic places significant strain on not only the RAF, but the country as a whole.
"Despite good intensions, including that of government and other transport entities, the RAF’s claims expenditure still remains unacceptably high at over R32 billion per annum, where each rand paid is a painful reminder of the extent to which lives are lost and people seriously injured on our roads. The claims expenditure, coupled with liabilities of more than R150 billion, represent large sums of money our country could assign to valuable services and infrastructure if the war on road crashes is won," said Dr Watson in a media release to the press.
At the beginning of February, the RAF released a statement saying that all payments from the organisation have been put on hold pending due to the RAF’s bank account being attached by the Sheriff of the Court. Where does this leave the public whose only financial support in some situations comes from the RAF?
What is being done?
It’s all very well condemning the fact that road deaths in South Africa is unacceptably high after the deaths have occurred, but that’s like lamenting losing a bet on a horse after the race was run, it’s kind of pointless.
We need to ask what is being done about road deaths before we approach seasons where we know there will likely be high death tolls.
Firstly, let’s look at the current rhetoric from government regarding this issue; Transport Minister Dipuo Peters assigned most of the blame for the current festive season death toll to customised high powered cars – which she labels as unsafe – and to what she refers to as stubborn and chauvinistic men.
Addressing the media in Midrand at the beginning of December, Peters said that new road fatality statistics have shown nearly 80% of the deaths on South African can be attributed to the latter issue.
Peters said this while she was delivering a progress report on the state of the Festive Season Road Safety Campaign which was launched at the beginning of December. “We claim no easy victories and we tell no lies in confronting the scourge of road carnage underpinned by lawlessness and a recalcitrant attitude of some of our road users‚” Peters said.
Readers weigh in
Naturally, this was a sore point for our readers who vociferously voiced their opinions on the matter.
John said that visible policing, and enforcement of the basics is the only way to resolve this. He added that every single day he sees vehicles going through red traffic lights, often once it is already green for the other traffic; reducing the speed limit or making more laws is unlikely to help. The problem we have in SA in general is not the lack of laws, but the enforcement of them.
Jack went so far as to say that the entire system must be reformed. From driving licence centre corruption, police corruption, enabling visible policing, scrapping the RAF entirely, mandatory third party insurance through exiting insurance industry, tighter enforcement on bus/minibus industry, infrastructure investment in non-motorised transport lanes and mandatory vehicle maintenance.
Finally, Clive Burgess pointed out that the only reason that the UK and Australia have a low death rate on their roads is a competent police presence. He said that if one tries speeding in Australia or the UK and they will quickly find the law being enforced.
