ANGELIQUE SERRAO and CANDICE BAILEY
CLUTCHES tied with wires, smooth tyres, no brakes and missing emergency exit windows.
This is the condition of some of the buses driving on the province’s roads. Even worse is that out of nearly 900 vehicles transporting schoolchildren, 88 percent of those inspected have been found to be unroadworthy, according to the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC).
Raymond Masango, the corporation’s control provincial inspector, said they tested buses contracted by the Department of Education to transport children, and private vehicles hired by parents to take their children to school.
Masango said they began the project in March, on the instruction of Community Safety MEC Faith Mazibuko.
So far, they have tested 865 buses, minibus taxis and bakkies. Of that number, 757 were found to be unroadworthy and only 108 passed.
“We’ve found that the state of vehicles are very poor. In all the testing we have done, we haven’t found more than a 10 percent pass rate. It’s very shocking,” said Masango.
On Thursday, a couple and their two children – aged one and three – were killed on the notorious Moloto Road in Pretoria, when the car they were driving veered onto the wrong side of the road and collided with a bus.
The bus dragged the car for 62m. A woman that was flung from the bus had her legs amputated on the scene.
Just hours after the gruesome accident, also on Moloto Road, 26 buses were stopped by traffic police at a roadblock.
“One had no brakes and its seats were loose. It was discontinued. Some had no public driver’s permits. Some had no driver’s licences.
“Aside from the 26 buses, we also stopped 372 vehicles. We issued 94 infringements,” said national traffic police chief David Tembe.
One bus even had vegetables packed in its front as high as the roof of the bus and all the passengers had goods on their laps – all contraventions of the National Road Traffic Act. Its driver received a fine.
Tembe’s deputy, Jody Pillay, said in the past they picked up bad defects.
“There are buses where the steering mechanisms are not working. The emergency exits windows are out. The windows are completely out, but the bus is still driving.
Earlier in the day, nine of the 26 buses pulled over were sent to the Centurion Testing Centre. Of those, five were found to have defects.
Masango said when they tested vehicles, they inspected them from front to back to check for things like brakes, the steering column and any oil leaks.
“If you had to see these vehicles, you would be shocked,” said Masango. “On some of them the clutch was tied with wire and one minibus taxi held 31 children inside.”
He said that when the vehicle was found to have failed the roadworthy test, the RTMC discontinued them from operation.
They did this by making a mark on the eNatis system, and their licence discs were removed until they have been retested and found to have fixed the problems.
The testing has so far been done in Vereeniging, Heidelberg, Wadeville, Lenasia, Nigel, Brakpan, Bronkhorstspruit, Roodepoort, Krugersdorp and Hammanskraal/Temba.
The testing in Hammanskraal and Temba took place on Wednesday, where over 157 vehicles were checked.
They stopped drivers and made them take their buses, taxis and bakkies to the Temba testing station.
The common problems were: overloading – more than five vehicles were carrying more than 30 children in vehicles designed to carry eight to 12 persons; faulty brakes in 90 percent of the vehicles; oil leaks; missing or no emergency exits; faulty lights; and used tyres.