Recognizing that I’m likely in the minority of South Africans who agree with the title of this post, I would like to argue why I hold this view.
Let’s begin with some data from the World Health Organization which charts the road traffic death rate per 100k population:
As seen in the chart above, among the African countries, South Africa is decidedly in the worst half of countries for fatal road accidents per capita.
But it gets worse; Looking at a chart of European countries (and paying special attention to the y-axis, we see that it’s even worse than you might have gleaned from the first chart.
So there you have it, South Africans need to slow the fuck down and hopefully less of us will die. Right? WRONG.
You could look at Germany, with its autobahn (highway) that has no speed limit, and realize the story isn’t as straight forward as “more fast = more death”
The reality is that South African drivers are especially useless. Frustratingly so. And I would argue that the system for licensing drivers is at fault.
Let’s pretend for a moment that many Saffers aren’t literally bribing their way to a pass in these tests and focus on the test itself. It is a relative joke. Let’s have a look at, say, Finland where the driving test is actually a test of driving ability, rather than a test of “can you drive like a partially blind fucken grandpa?”
So here’s my argument: Fix the fucking testing system; Make the test actually incorporate true driving skill, stop the fucking corruption of bribery in the test system and in a couple of generations we will be much better off for it. And need less stringent speed limits so that those of us who are in a hurry, can hurry.
Rant over.
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