One would be forgiven for thinking South African society has absolutely no regard for human life. If the statistics of road fatalities are anything to go by, then we are a society that largely accepts death as inevitable.
Media reports indicate we have suffered the loss of hundreds of lives on our roads just from December 1. This unacceptable loss of loved ones has a profoundly negative impact on our society. The grief families experience at this time, a time when there are expectations of joy, creates bitterness and a sense of profound callousness in our society. The helplessness felt by these families, does nothing towards building a better society.
Instead it creates countless people who are carrying traumatic experiences with very little in the way of reprieve. Multiply this by the number of South Africans who have been affected by road accidents in one way or another, and you have a traumatised nation carrying the burden of the great unfairness of it all.
According to the 2016-17 Road Traffic Management Corporation report, 77% of all road fatalities are due to human error. While there are other causes of road accidents, if we can call them that, most are caused by other human beings.
In essence, the callous acts of human beings are causing the needless death of other human beings.
The anger and bitterness we carry therefore is not against cars, roads, tyres, cellphones or other such contributors to road deaths, but against fellow human beings.
It is not too difficult to surmise that, if we carry this anger towards each other, we have less tolerance for each other, and we are constantly primed for suspicion, conflict and reciprocal callousness.
There are a few of those human causes of fatal accidents that really demonstrate the sheer murderous callousness which inhabits our roads.
At the top of these causes are distractions which cause the driver to take their eyes off the road. One of the most common of these distractions is cellphone use, which drivers just refuse to give up.
Coming a close second is drunk driving, a scourge which has been fought consistently for many years, with little success.
Then comes speeding which makes avoiding obstacles near impossible, especially for illequipped and poorly trained drivers. None of these causes are news, so drivers are relatively well informed about them, yet they continue to engage in actions which are proven to be the leading cause of death on the our roads.
Why are we caught up in this fatalistic vicious circle?
During a Southern African Transport Conference held in Pretoria in 2017, Kobus Labuschagne, chief engineer of traffic engineering at the Gauteng department of roads and transport, reported that in 2015, road accidents cost SA R143bn, 3.4% of GDP. That was in 2015!
In a depressed economic environment like ours, I am sure we could use a 3.4% boost to our GDP. The real impact of road accidents is not only the human lives lost and the carnage to our emotional wellbeing as a nation, but the carnage extends to our finances as well.
Surely the state has failed here, and unfortunately it does not seem as if it is about to get a handle on the situation.
The Arrive Alive campaign has been going on for about 14 years, but we are nowhere near eradicating the scourge of needless deaths on our roads.
Perhaps, if this was the only area in which the state was failing, there would be some hope. But needless death abounds in SA. Murder – whether it’s political assassinations, taxi killings, farm murders, gender-based killings, murder and robbery, or initiation deaths – these form part of the toxic concoction which is literally strangling the life out of SA.
Isn’t it the precise reason for the existence of the state to protect us from needless death?
Law enforcement has failed to enforce existing laws in this regard. For this reason no amount of traffic regulations will make an impact as long as law enforcement is not improved for effectiveness.
The newly proposed regulations by the Road Traffic Management Corporation may sound impressive, but they are a product of desperation.
More importantly, South African society has a problem with trusting the rule of law itself. This is what we need to address, even before we address effective law enforcement...