2 February 2020
The accident this week in Vanderbjlpark, which saw 19 children injured when a minibus they were travelling in overturned, has once again shone the spotlight on the perils of scholar transport.
Over the years, overloaded scholar transport vehicles have been killing and maiming our kids. Earlier this month, traffic cops pulled over a 14-seater minibus taxi that was ferrying 58 pupils.
The National Association of School Governing Bodies told Sunday World this week that it was investigating whether school governing bodies (SGBs) were checking numbers of children in scholar transport vehicles daily. This is not anywhere near enough.
SGBs, parents and traffic authorities should hang their heads in shame as we continue to have carnage on our roads owing to scholar transport.
Parents, in particular, have a responsibility to ensure that their kids don’t travel in overloaded skodonks to their respective schools and are ferried by licensed operators.
It is understandable that some parents leave their homes in the wee hours of the morning for work and don’t get the opportunity to see their children being bundled into overloaded vehicles. Notwithstanding, parents still have to make it a point that their children use legal scholar transportation.
Any of these greedy and negligent operators who overload children or drive kids in unroadworthy vehicles should be reported to authorities and brought to book.
It is high time we take responsibility and save our kids from travelling in death traps. They are the future of our country.
Chinese way may help cure SA’s ills
Videos and images coming out of China show the shockingly rapid progress the city of Wuhan is making in building new hospitals to fight the deadly coronavirus. It is not only something to behold, but state capacity we should seek to emulate.
The Chinese, who are our Brics partners, have shown us that if you shore up your state capacity to deliver major projects on time and on budget, and cut unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape, things can be done – and done quickly.
Since the Zuma years until the new year, successive administrations have promised the country a massive infrastructure roll-out to fix our roads, new clinics and hospitals, and to fix our decaying public infrastructure.
Not surprisingly, very little has been done since as our leaders spend too much time navigating the treacherous political climate instead of implementing policy decisions.
We are a country with lots of ideas and policies on how we can improve the lives of our people, but the shortage of state capacity coupled with poor cadre deployment has hamstrung the ability of the state to rebuild South Africa.
We could achieve a lot as a nation if we learned from best practices from our friends.
The Chinese way might just be the perfect tonic for our republic.
