Two accidents involving tipper trucks on the evening of 21 August confirm the compromised road safety experienced in the Komatipoort area, where truckers continue to do whatever they can to avoid the ore queue, squeezing through the Lebombo border to the Port of Maputo.
In the one incident, two tippers collided on the N4 near the Tenbosch Road T-junction, a road often used by truckers looping around to the north-east, heading through sugarcane country and rejoining the road to Komatipoort south of the Kruger National Park’s Crocodile Bridge Gate.
In another incident, a truck, once again a tipper heading towards the bottlenecked border, collided with a taxi on the Nweti Bridge in the Strydom Block area south of Komatipoort.
Like the Tenbosch Road area, Strydom Block is an agricultural area consisting of gravel roads and narrow bridges not meant for trucks laden with heavy ore.
Cobus Botha, who heads up the local agricultural association, told Freight News recently that the community’s secondary roads and infrastructure were steadily facing destruction at the hands of transporters unscrupulously pushing freight through Lebombo, often expecting their drivers to willingly break the law.
A source said the Nweti accident had happened on a bridge so narrow that two cars could barely pass one another, let alone handle speeding trucks rattling across old infrastructure not meant for loads over 55 tonnes.
Botha said that, at best, sugarcane trucks weighing just over 50 tonnes should use bridges such as the one at Nweti.
With trucks routinely skipping the queue by driving through Strydom Block, often to Mananga Road, which rejoins the N4 right before the border, farmers fear the roads supposed to carry lighter loads are being steadily pulverised into dirt.
“And the traffic police continue to do nothing about it,” said the source.
“It’s illegal for ore trucks to use these roads, and yet it’s allowed by officers looking on as tippers race past on farm roads, posing a real danger to the people living in this area.
“When traffic cops do stop tip-truck drivers from using roads in Strydom Block, it’s to ask for bribes. They’re not in the business of maintaining the law. They’re in the business of asking transgressors to pay them for using roads they’re not supposed to.”
He said law enforcement executives who had asked for evidence of bribery and traffic officials who were not doing their work did nothing when videos were posted on a WhatsApp security group formed to address safety and security issues stemming from the Maputo Corridor’s ore truck queue.
“The other day I posted a video of a traffic official sleeping on duty at one of the intersections, but nothing was done. A law enforcer like that should rather throw his uniform away as it doesn’t mean anything.”
- Freight News is still waiting to hear from any representative of the SA Police Service and various traffic departments to respond to ongoing allegations of gross negligence and corruption.
