Nzimande was speaking to members of the media in Pretoria, where he released the preliminary festive season Road Safety Report earlier on this afternoon. The report details accidents and fatalities recorded on South African roads between the period from 1 December 2018 to 8 January this year.

“A total of 54 lives were lost in these crashes and the Free State was the most affected. By way of illustration, these were the vehicles I’m talking about, it may be a few crashes but the number of fatalities was very high,” Nzimande said.

Nzimande had previously expressed his concern about collisions involving these kinds of vehicles during the release of the mid-festive season preliminary road safety report in December last year. He also revealed that preliminary figures showed that crashes recorded in the recent festive period totalled 1286, while 1612 fatalities were recorded from collisions which happened across nine provinces in the country. This figure shows a 7% increase from last year’s figure which recorded 1527 fatalities on South African roads during the 2017/18 road festive season.

"The carnage we continue to experience on our roads are instigated by a number of factors mostly embedded in human behaviour and vehicle factors. This includes alcohol and substance abuse, reckless and negligent driving, unroadworthy vehicles, overtaking on blind rises, total disregard for rules of the road, corruption, distracted driving and failure to use seatbelts," Nzimande said.

OFM News