18 Nov 2014

The Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Mr Tshenolo Mabeo says although there has been a reduction in the number of road accidents deaths from 333 last year for the period of January to October to 266 of the same period this year, the figure is still high.

Officiating at the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims in Nata on November 16, Minister Mabeo said every single loss of life had great impact on the nation as well as in the economy.

 And it was for that reason that there was need for the nation as whole to join hands and come up with strategies that would reduce road carnage. The responsibility of roads safety, he said, begins with an individual by taking into consideration necessary precautions which will make the roads safe for everybody.

“The onus is on all of us to take personal responsibility for our own lives and the lives of other road users,” he emphasised. He further said it is for communities to work as a collective to ensure that all obstacles such as cattle roaming on roads are removed because doing so will lead to clean roads hence ensure safety on roads.

Mr Mabeo added that his ministry will always play a facilitatory role despite the challenges of lack of funds faced by government. However, he noted that they will work tirelessly to provide quality road networks for mobility and as well as provide proper legislative frameworks to ensure the safety of road users.

Currently, he highlighted, the ministry and its stakeholders have come up with the national road safety strategy which is a blueprint that seeks to provide preventative measures to curb road carnage. 

The principal objective, he said, was to guide and drive road safety programmes in order to stabilise and reduce road fatalities in the country at least by half by 2020.

The implementation process, he stated, has earnestly started and it is for this reason that as ministry, they commit to the resuscitation of district road safety committees across the country and called upon all such committees to increase their pace and operationalise the national strategy.

On other issues, the minister noted that it is places such as Nata that road safety committees need to hit the ground running because the place seems to be some sort of a transport hub with transportation, businesses and tourism as well as other economic activities having converged and operating.

He said much as this is welcome development, it has also come with some undesirable challenges such as illegal social activities and road accidents. 

Meanwhile, Kgosi Rebagamang Rancholo of Nata said Nata has been identified as a flooding area and as a result roads and the drainage system were not designed with consideration for water flow.

 He therefore suggested that in future during construction of and even refurbishment of roads these should be considered so that the flow of water is not interrupted. ENDS