MEDIA RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TO: ALL NEWS EDITORS
SUBJECT: ROAD SAFETY AT FESTIVE TIMES – AND ALL YEAR ROUND
ISSUED BY: JUSTICE PROJECT SOUTH AFRICA
DATE OF ISSUE: MONDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2010

JOHANNESBURG – The Matric exams will soon be done and dusted and as soon as they are, the unofficial start to the festive season will begin. With the start of the “season to be merry” will come the usual revelling and shockingly enough, the official “Festive Season death toll” on South Africa's roads will begin getting tallied.

Ahead of this, the JMPD has taken the pre-emptive move of “clamping down” on offenders who commit serious offences like driving on the wrong side of the road, facing oncoming traffic. Whilst it is certainly not a nice sight for school children to see their mothers arrested and hauled off to jail for doing exactly what taxi drivers have been criticised for doing for as long as most can remember, the fact still remains that driving in the face of oncoming traffic is unlawful, a criminal offence and worse yet, it is extremely dangerous.

These ladies have been charged with a criminal offence and if convicted, they will get a permanent criminal record, just like the scores of other motorists, also arrested under “Operation Nomakanjani” and other blitzes around the country have for a range of offences. Therein lies the problem.

Lawlessness and discourtesy

Lawlessness has infested South Africa's roads and the attitudes and behaviour of motorists have deteriorated further over a significant period of time (not just of late). One need only look at the horrifically high road fatalities track record of South Africa over the past 15 years to see that something clearly needs to be done. However, this is not a phenomenon that has appeared overnight albeit that it has not been gradual either; and instant solutions are therefore not possible.

An online poll conducted by the AA of South Africa that was announced by BP a few days ago revealed that “76% of South African motorists break the law each day”, but what it failed to mention was that this was a voluntary poll, not a scientific survey.

Without detracting from the results of this poll, it is important to note that such polls rely on the honesty and self-analysis of the participants and from our observations, many people who regard themselves as “law abiding citizens” or “good drivers” break many of the rules of the road each day without even realizing it.  This percentage whilst “shockingly high” to some is probably erring heavily on the low side.

But is draconian enforcement and AARTO the only or indeed, the most effective way to deal with the problems we face? Is giving ordinary people and housewives criminal records going to address the problem effectively or is it going to worsen it? We think it will have little or no positive effect beyond creating further resentment for law enforcement agencies.

Discourtesy on our roads is so commonplace that there will be few who will even try to deny their absolute astonishment when another motorist waves them on to enter traffic in dense traffic. In fact, so profound is the effect that this often has a knock-on effect – causing the driver who was waved on to do similar to other motorists they encounter in that trip.

We call this the phenomenon of “Courtesy is contagious. Let's start an epidemic.” and this is no pipe dream, but is a proven fact.

This, amongst a host of other initiatives forms part of a comprehensive list of solutions and alternative approaches to road safety that are contained in JPSA's “THINK! Campaign” which has been proposed to the City of Johannesburg's MMC for Public Safety. Elements of the campaign, which focuses strongly on restorative justice and other alternative corrective as opposed to punitive approaches were previously put to the National Department of Transport, but met with no interest at all.

The proposal to the City of Johannesburg has come a little late for its full implementation this year but if it does wish to move forward with JPSA's plans, then there are some elements that can be implemented immediately without too much effort.

Rolling enforcement and “super roadblocks”

The RTMC and Department of Transport's “rolling enforcement plan” has been a plan of action to tackle the significant rise in road fatalities that occur around holiday times and despite this being a superb initiative with respect to enforcing traffic laws, little or no evidence exists on it actually achieving a significant drop in road fatalities.

Recently, so-called “super roadblocks” were announced by National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele and involvement from multi-disciplinary law enforcement agencies is to form part of this initiative. Widespread panic and fear of the unknown has resulted, leading to a number of differing opinions and conspiracy theories being born. The predominance of roadblocks conducted by traffic authorities focussing solely on outstanding fines has also lead to concerns being raised.

What authorities tend to forget when criticising those who complain about incessant roadblocks is that the very real delays caused by these exercises set up on National Freeways and busy arterial roads affect everyone stuck in them, not just those with outstanding fines or something else to hide. Sometimes the traffic jams caused by these roadblocks are so severe that they actually cause motorists to break the law when they finally clear them, by rushing to make up lost time.

Concerns of human rights (and constitutional) infringements becoming a problem and feature of these “super roadblocks” have arisen and the statement that passengers will also be checked for, amongst other things, alcohol consumption, has rung alarm bells in many people's minds.

It is ludicrous to even contemplate that party revellers will be arrested for travelling in a vehicle with a sober driver and JPSA has its doubts that any law enforcement agency, let alone the SAPS would be so trivial or litigation-inviting as to start arresting and charging passenger who are over the limit and are not interfering with the ability of a designated sober driver to drive safely. It must however be remembered that such people will have to behave themselves, so as not to cause distraction of or interference with the ability of the designated driver to exercise full control over the vehicle.

People who drink and then drive must expect to be arrested and prosecuted as criminals and that is that.

Designated drivers

Much confusion abounds surrounding the laws on drink-driving and this is due to the fact that it is still legal to consume alcohol and then drive a vehicle in South Africa. But the sad fact is that any amount of alcohol in a person's blood stream affects their ability to drive correctly and the sooner South Africans wake up and realise this, the sooner some effect on crashes involving drunk drivers will start decreasing.

JPSA's firm standpoint on this issue is if you have had any alcohol to drink, get someone who hasn't to do the driving. The concept of designated drivers has been successfully implemented in many parts of the world and if we are going to compare South Africa with other countries when we wish to justify implementing a points demerit system, then we should be doing exactly the same when it comes to having designated drivers.

We don't need complicated laws to enact this, just common sense and possibly the buy-in from establishments that serve alcohol so that they; like establishments in some other countries may encourage the concept by offering free soft drinks to designated drivers.

JPSA will publish a list of all establishments who wish to participate in offering this to their patrons on its website at www.jp-sa.org/designated.asp and invites all establishments who would like to participate to let JPSA have your details by visiting that web page.

“Operation Duty Calls”

You may have noticed that since the inception of “Operation Duty Calls” by the SAPS, a high number of SA Police vehicles can be seen driving around on freeways and other roads with their blue lights flashing. The nett effect of this has been a noticeable change in driving behaviour of motorists close to these police vehicles and numerous motorists have been pulled off by SAPS and checked, even if they were doing nothing wrong.

This is a fantastic initiative on the part of the SAPS and JPSA applauds them for this pro-active, albeit unannounced approach that they have implemented. Perhaps traffic authorities, the JMPD included will follow this example at some stage and realise that covert policing has its place, but most definitely not in the high proportion that has been employed by traffic authorities for such a long time now.

Visible policing and blue flashing lights on marked law enforcement vehicles have a profound effect on motorists and automatically makes them more vigilant to obeying traffic law.

Corruption

Corruption, bribe solicitation and payment has become somewhat of a buzz-word in South Africa of late. After the revelations of the LEAD SA poll to determine the extent of corruption, this problem has been further highlighted however we hasten to add that as surprising as it may seem, the poll has not revealed just how bad things are, even though the figures produced are shocking to some. We would estimate that the results are merely the tip of the iceberg and the problem is way larger than even this poll has revealed.

It is hard to believe that South Africa only rates as “average” on the scale of corruption released by the Corruption Watch Index of Transparency International but it must be borne in mind that this survey relies heavily on perceptions held by the public. From JPSA's experience there are still plenty of people in South Africa who do not believe that corruption is spiralling out of control, despite what may be seen on the face of media exposure on this topic.

Corruption in law enforcement, particularly traffic law enforcement is significantly more rife than most would like to acknowledge, not just amongst Metro Police but traffic officers in general and this is due to the isolated and often unsupervised nature of their work.

Proposals on dealing with corruption have been put to numerous role-players by JPSA and are still under consideration by some however, we will be mounting some exercises in the near future, as we have done in the past to address a few corruption issues that we have intelligence on. These exercises are always conducted by us in conjunction with the SAPS.

The biggest single problem that we face is the reluctance of the public to come forward and cooperate in counter-corruption operations due to their inherent fear of being victimised by the perpetrators of corrupt activities. This is very sad as it means that we have to work significantly harder to tackle these problems than we would if members of the public were prepared to come forward and work with us and the Police to tackle the problem properly.

JPSA “LEAD SA” initiatives

Justice Project South Africa supports the LEAD SA initiative and wishes to add the following calls to the LEAD SA pot of initiatives:

•   â€œCourtesy is contagious. Let's start an epidemic.”

o   This simple initiative calls for all people, motorists or not to adopt more courteous behaviour towards their fellow human beings.

o   Simple greetings and acknowledgement of your fellow human beings makes the world of difference and a simple “please” and “thank you” combined with a friendly smile goes a long way.

o   Wait your turn in queues and don't push in. This applies inside and outside of your vehicle and you always need to remember that the emergency lane and shoulder of the road is for emergencies only.

o   Letting someone go ahead of you is not a crime and often, by doing so, you will almost certainly generate a friendly response like a wave or a “thank you” from them.

o   If everyone stuck in a traffic jam were just to let someone else merge into traffic ahead of them, traffic jams would be significantly eased and everyone would get where they want to go quicker. This is not conjecture, it is a proven fact.

o   Always remember that “this is Africa” and as much as we all want to be punctual, most reasonable people will understand if you are delayed in traffic if you just let them know timeously. Getting aggressive because you are late is self-defeating and more often than not makes you even later.

o   Try acting courteously and you will be amazed by the results!

•   Stop calling crashes “accidents”

o   We are acutely aware that the word “accident” is an internationally accepted and used term when referring to a motor vehicle crashing into another vehicle, person or animal but we believe that the time has long since passed for this word to be scrapped when referring to crashes.

o   Vehicle crashes are not “oopsies” involving spilling a drop or two of water on the carpet; they are things that cost enormous amounts of money, cause pain and suffering, spill blood; and way more often than can be deemed as “acceptable”, the loss of human life.

o   The loss of a human life in violent circumstances such as road crashes is not an “accident” it is a tragedy and trivialising these incidents is tantamount to (an unintentional) total loss of humanity.

o   JPSA hereby calls on everyone, particularly those in the media and those who speak publicly about road crashes, especially those involving fatalities to cease calling crashes (or collisions) “accidents” with immediate effect.

o   Please understand that JPSA is not criticising for the sake of criticising and does not wish to alienate the media and/or traffic reporters or anyone else by making this call. Our intent is to get everyone used to deglamourizing and de-trivialising the seriousness of crashes, the vast majority of which occur due to bad road behaviour and/or inattention – and of course, bad road conditions.

<ENDS>

Contacts: Howard Dembovsky – National Chairperson – JPSA – 082 418 6210

                Bessie van Antwerp – National Secretary – JPSA – 082 465 4784