Carnage on our roads not about the numbers
ROAD crashes cost the South African economy R166 billion a year – enough to bail out Eskom, SA Airways and the SABC, fund free education and build some RDP houses with the change.
Of the R166bn, R34bn is channelled via a R1.93 cents per litre fuel levy to the Road Accident Fund (RAF) annually but it’s poorly and wastefully administered when the focus should be on preventing the crashes and carnage.
The country’s roads are notoriously dangerous: 14 000 people die on them every year, averaging 38 a day, with as many as 522 000 admitted to hospitals with injury. Thirty-eight percent of the deaths and injuries are pedestrians and half of crash victims have blood-alcohol levels exceeding the limit. The RAF receives about 92 000 claims a year and has an outstanding claim count of 245 000 increasing by 50 000 claims a year.
Celebrating an apparent “massive decrease” in this year’s Easter road death toll is fudging the numbers rather than fixing the root of the problem, warns a private law expert.
Professor Hennie Klopper, of the Department of Private Law at the University of Pretoria who leads the Association for the Protection of Road Accident Victims, says context is important when looking at the road death numbers. They haven’t , as Transport Minister Blade Nzimande has trumpeted, decreased by a “massive” 48% from 309 to 162. Rather, the numbers have increased.
This year’s Easter period was shorter. As Manny de Freitas, the DA’s transport spokesperson notes, this year’s statistics cover the five-day period from April 18 to 22; last year, the Easter period was defined as 12 days, from March 29 to April 9.
“(Nzimande is) being disingenuous and sly with the South African public. It is obvious when comparing statistics between the 11 days last year and the five days this year that all (death) statistics will reduce,” De Freitas says.
Klopper believes the government is not doing much to halt road deaths.
“Road safety is a constitutional right. When 100 people die in floods, they declare a day of mourning. But 14000 people die on our roads and nothing is said.
“More than 522000 are seriously injured and many of them are admitted to public hospitals, burdening the system.”
With most fatalities happening within a 60km radius of homes, travel in urban areas is much riskier to and from work than during holiday seasons. Crashes during holidays are often horrific because of the speeds involved, however, any accident at more than 20km/h causes injury.
“You are not designed to travel at those velocities. It doesn’t matter which car you drive,” he says.
A 2015 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research study found that for every crash victim, four other lives were severely affected – these are the children and other dependants.
The answer isn’t clamping down only on drunk-driving, it’s behaviour modification.
Without enforcement, the Transport Department’s strategies won’t work, Klopper says. Failure to enforce is to blame for the high road fatality levels.