Alarmingly high death toll cannot be ignored, writes Hector Eliott
JUSTICE Minister Jeff Radebe’s senseless shutdown of the Western Cape’s successful name and shame anti-drunk driving campaign comes as no surprise to anyone in South Africa with any interest in road safety.
The context is as follows: this year, the Medical Research Council, using body counts from morgues, determined that 17 700 people had died on South Africa’s roads in 2009, that’s 36 road deaths per 100 000 people.
Let’s compare that to our Brics partners: we’re at seven times the death rate of China and three times that of India. Our death rate is close to twice that of Brazil.
The Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC), the national body responsible for road safety, naively believes there were “only” 13 768 deaths on our roads in 2009.
This massive disjuncture between reality and the RTMC’s statistics means we have no way of knowing the full range of devastation endured by our society: the body charged to deal with the issue is living in a dream world.
We can make some assumptions from international and local experience, though, such as that there are at least four serious injuries for every fatality.
This means, among other things, burns, dismemberment, paralysis, brain damage and blindness for about 70 800 people each year.
The cost in human misery is inestimable, as survivors grapple to deal with horrific injuries, posttraumatic stress and financial disaster. Families are being senselessly torn apart every day.
The victims are often children – road trauma is the leading cause of death for children between the ages of five and 14, mostly run over by careless motorists or unintentionally killed by parents who didn’t buckle them in.
The latest estimate of the annual cost to the economy of road trauma is R302 billion a year, or roughly 10 percent of the GDP. In other developing countries, the average is 2 percent.
The Medical Research Council’s 2009 data indicates that by now – in 2013 – the number of road deaths each year will likely have exceeded the number of murders, making road deaths the leading cause of violent death in South Africa. Only our horrific burden of disease keeps it from the number one spot.
In other words, thousands of people are being needlessly slaughtered, and tens of thousands are being horrifically injured, while our economy is being held to ransom.
And, unlike our other societal woes, it is almost entirely avoidable, simply by implementing the basics of road safety, a science that has been developed over more than six decades.
The problem is that it requires political will from the top, and in South Africa, that will is completely lacking. President Jacob Zuma did not even mention road safety in his State of the Nation address.
This is a breathtaking omission in a country where at least 17 700 people are being needlessly slaughtered each year, with disastrous results for an economy desperate to achieve the kind of growth needed to create jobs and lift our people out of poverty.
He gives the impression that he simply doesn’t care, which hopefully means he doesn’t know, but which in turn begs the question of what he is doing running the country in the first place.
Successive national transport ministers, S’bu Ndebele and now Ben Martins have made a few of the right noises, and KwaZulu-Natal Transport MEC Willies Mchunu has shown some mettle, even if he did meekly bow to national government’s meddling in his own name and shame campaign in 2011.
In the Western Cape, however, there is genuine political will to tackle the crisis. MEC Robin Carlisle has thrown himself into the struggle head first from the day he took office.
The results have been astonishing – a 30 percent decrease in fatalities since 2009, an incredible reduction for any region of comparable size, and the name and shame campaign has featured prominently.
This achievement is all the more impressive in that the Western Cape and its municipalities hold few of the main levers required to drive road safety, which rest with national government. SAPS’s 19 000 members in the province are a case in point.
Carlisle is a DA MEC, and it has been suggested that Radebe shutting down the name and shame campaign in the Western Cape is a political ploy to close down a successful DA project.
I don’t believe the ANC would knowingly sacrifice the lives of Western Cape citizens for a few votes, even if the behaviour of some of its provincial leadership sometimes indicates otherwise.
It seems more likely to me that the shutdown actually came as a result of the ANC’s blasé attitude to road safety, epitomised by Zuma omitting it from his address.
The AARTO comedy of errors and the succession of ANC politicians bust for drunk driving, speeding or running people over in their blue-light convoys is bad enough.
Nothing, however, makes the ANC’s indifference to the slaughter clearer than the fact that South Africa has yet to produce a national strategy for the UN’s Decade of Action for Road Safety, despite South Africa being a signatory to the 2009 Moscow Convention.
The decade lasts from 2011 to 2020, and it is already mid-2013, with no sign of progress. In stark contrast to this astonishing footdragging insouciance towards the safety of road users is the speed at which the ANC has been pumping through toll-road legislation.
When it comes to emptying people’s pockets with tolls, the ANC moves like lightning, but when it comes to keeping those same people safe on those same roads, it’s like they’re smoking Slo-Mo, the fictional drug in the South African-made sci-fi film Dredd, which slows time to a fraction of its normal speed.
While the shutdown of the name and shame campaign may not be political, what is clear is that it will take political change before the terrible slaughter on our roads is taken seriously by the government, and before this sea-anchor consuming 10 percent of our GDP each year, and dragging our economy to the bottom, can be cut away.
