It was misty, then cloudy – we got up pretty high in those KZN hills on the Mercedes-Benz S-Class launch – and then it was raining. Raining so heavily that even the mighty, high-tech wipers on the latest limo from Stuttgart found the going tough.
Headlights lit, high-intensity front and rear fog lights blazing, we slowed and slowed as visibility shrank from not a lot down to very little. In a period of less than 20 minutes SEVEN minibus taxis swept unexpectedly out of the murk, past, and back into the spray.
Headlights on? Not a bloody chance – exactly what their passengers would have had had another driver, expecting to see headlights, taken a chance to quickly overtake a donkey cart or elderly, labouring, rusty bakkie on that winding mountain road.
Lights out, in fact. Maybe another "15 dead in grisly taxi wreck" downpage story on page six of The Star or the Cape Argus, casually noted by the bean counters totting up the day's take in camera fines in the offices of what passes for traffic departments these days.
Maybe 40 kids without a parent but, hey, does the Minister of Transport, Jeff Radebe, exhort municipalities to get bums out from behind desks and into cars to hunt down such traffic imbeciles?
Nope. We're told road deaths cost the nation billions of rands a year. Hey Jeff, why not get pro-active? Spend a few million on better traffic policing, a TV broadside of road-safety messages – perhaps even instructional programmes – and save all that money to help pay for cranespotting expeditions.
Speed kills? Like hell – stupid, ignorant drivers, like those we saw in KZN kill. And you, Mr Minister, have the power to do something. How about getting on with it?
