Justice Project says Festive season road death statistics are again misleading
It is with great sadness that Justice Project South Africa again finds itself having to contradict statements made with respect to the 2014/15 festive season road death toll allegedly declining.
In her speech today, the Minister of Transport stated that “The Festive Season spanning from 1 December 2014 to 5 January 2015 depicts a gloomy picture of the state of road safety. During this period we registered 1118 fatal crashes with 1368 fatalities. Compared to the same reporting period last year we registered 1147 fatal crashes with 1376 fatalities. This indicates a slight reduction of 2,5% for fatal crashes and 0,6% for fatalities.”
On 9 January 2014, the Minister of Transport held a media briefing at the offices of the Road Accident Fund in Centurion. At this media briefing she stated that “For the period under review, there were 1147 crashes nationally, with 1376 fatalities.” The period under review in 2014 was 1 December 2013 to 7 January 2014.
Again this year, 2 full days were shaved off the monitoring period. The 2013/14 monitoring period had 3 full days shaved off it over the 2012/13 festive season monitoring period which ran to 10 January 2013 and therefore, over the past 2 years, a full 5 days have been shaved off the monitoring period, in an apparent blatant attempt to make it appear that there has been a reduction in road deaths over the festive season, however small that reduction may be claimed to be.
The so-called decline should not therefore be “half-heartedly acknowledged”; it should be whole-heartedly rejected since the measuring period is significantly unequal and therefore this manipulation has the effect of skewing the statistics. It is completely preposterous to suggest that there were no fatal crashes and road deaths on the 6th and 7th of January 2015. In fact it is notable that as a result of this skewing, the slaying of Sergeant Curt Oosthuizen of the SAPS West Rand Flying Squad through being crashed into at a roadblock on Tuesday 6 January 2015 is not included in this year’s statistics.
The delinquency of many motorists who refuse to abide by even the simplest of the rules of the road is a symptom of a far wider problem of the incorrect, inefficient and largely absent traffic law enforcement that takes place throughout the year. The high volume of fatal crashes also bears testimony to a largely defunct driver licensing testing system and the systemic corruption in both, traffic law enforcement and driving licence testing centres in South Africa.
While an improvement in these two facets of road safety will not miraculously reduce our road fatalities by half on their own, cleaning up these two areas would have a significant effect on reducing the carnage on our roads and on road safety in general. Skewing statistics however, is counter-productive.
Howard Dembovsky
National Chairman – Justice Project South Africa (NPC)
