South Africans are great at playing the blame game,
particularly when it’s easy to deflect the blame, or when it’s easy to blame
the obvious candidate, while the real party at fault manages to avoid
responsibility. There’s no environment where this happens more frequently than
on our roads and in our traffic, where we seldom look further than the person
in front of us that has been a party to a tragic accident, failing to
interrogate the deeper issues.
One particularly clear example of this is the Field’s
Hill accident on the evening of 5 September 2013, when Sanele
Goodness May lost control of the truck he was driving, and ploughed through an
intersection, killing 22 people. May was since convicted of culpable homicide,
fraud, breaking immigration laws, being in possession of fake licences and
traffic offences. He is currently in prison, but will likely be released
earlier than the eight years and 10 months of his sentence.
While May is sitting behind bars, the owner of the vehicle walks free, although
he bemoaned how the accident ruined his business in a newspaper article late in 2015. Gregory Govender, the
owner of Sagekal Logistics and May’s employer, said that ‘he has lost friends,
his business and his reputation’ – making himself sound very much the victim.
What of the 22 people that died because Govender failed to check whether his
employee was qualified and licensed to do the job? What of the burden that May
will live with forever, that he killed those people because he was given a tool
to do his job that was not mechanically safe to be on the roads? Why have the
authorities not prosecuted Govender for these shortcomings, when it is
completely plausible that his other vehicles suffered the same faults – and
that the rest of his workforce had also escaped the scrutiny required before
taking their place behind the wheel of massive vehicles?
Elsewhere in the world, the company owner would be held as liable for this
disaster as the driver – if not more so. This is true of other sectors in South
Africa – if there is a mining accident, the mining company is held responsible,
fined, and production halted in order to find the cause of the incident and institute
remedies to prevent repetitions of the disaster. The same is true elsewhere in
the manufacturing sector, where companies are held to the highest Occupational
Health and Safety laws – and are fined for not complying.
Why, then, are the companies behind South Africa’s extensive road logistics
industry, not held accountable and liable for the safety of working environment
– the trucks – that their workers operate in?
This culture of blaming the driver in incidents like the Field’s Hill incident,
and the Rheenendal accident near Knysna in 2014 is not going to
help the sector improve. It makes it easy for transport companies to blame their
employees, and just move on. Safety in this sector is going to continue at its
appalling current rate unless vehicle owners are held responsible for what
happens with their trucks and their drivers on the road – starting with them
checking their drivers’ qualifications, and making sure that their vehicles
really are roadworthy.
Opinion piece submitted by Chris Harry, the Managing Director of HCV.
Article first
appeared in: 
http://www.autoforum.co.za/View-News-Article.aspx?News=10643
