The town of Pongola, which lies on the N2 between Eswatini and the Phongolo River, literally shakes with dozens of heavily-laden multi-wheelers driving by at all hours.
Road users in the vicinity constantly dice with death as they navigate the treacherous stretch of road in northern KwaZulu-Natal, dotted with potholes and dusty trucks loaded with commodities from sugar cane to coal.
That economic artery, stained with the blood of many innocents — most recently 18 schoolchildren, a teaching assistant and a driver after a truck allegedly driving against oncoming traffic crashed into their bakkie — is also the quintessential story of SA’s troubled state.
It tells the story of a transport minister who has failed to heed the complaints of the people.
Since 2019, Pongola resident Jabu Hansen has pleaded for the department's intervention, tweeting about the danger of the N2 running through the middle of the town, calling out the municipality's snail's pace inefficiency in addressing the crisis and warning of impending crashes that will “take many lives”.
Last month he tried again to petition the transport department for urgent intervention, warning of dangerous trucks and lack of traffic cops. No response.
The image of a mangled bakkie under the truck speaks also to transport minister Fikile Mbalula being out of touch with the people.
His obligatory cut-and-paste, “road safety continues to be a priority for our government: law enforcement at all spheres of government co-ordinates plans to prevent road crashes like these”, was inconsiderate.
His political spiel and bragging posts about being in Qatar while 20 families were devastated in northern KZN were called out for being “tone deaf” on social media and rightly so.
The mangled remains represent a complicated political and economic web that has ensnared our logistics state-owned enterprise. We no longer move cargo via rail, instead turning to roads and damaging our infrastructure for a host of reasons. This impact of state capture is not academic or something that has been argued before the Zondo Commission — it is felt in the carnage on our roads and the lives lost.
The accident and subsequent reaction fuels the decades-long political battle between the ANC and IFP in KZN, with Zululand mayor Thulasizwe Buthelezi calling for a national strategy to regulate the number of trucks passing through the area.
While his call is sound in principle and reflects the lack of road transport policing, the subtext of the challenge to the minister to do his job is crystal clear.
The spilt blood draws attention to our unchecked pupil transport system in which scores of children are piled onto the back of a bakkie or packed like sardines in taxis to get to schools not within walking distances.
Last Friday morning, more than a dozen school pupils were injured in a minibus taxi accident on the M19 near Reservoir Hills, Durban. This is a terrible statistic recorded weekly in any part of the country.
Then there is the issue of immediate speculation that the truck driver, who fled the scene after the accident, is an undocumented foreigner and the transport company who hired him should be brought to book, which narrates the quagmire and impasse in the transport sector.
This has pitted organisations such as the All Truck Drivers' Foundation, a forum of SA truck drivers advocating for 100% employment of locals, against the transport department and logistics stakeholders for several years.
And finally, the tragedy speaks about a head of a state who, in between his charm offensive with US vice-president Kamala Harris over omelette roulade and chicken apple sausage and standing in a queue at the royal send-off, found time to say the country could not afford to lose such precious lives on the back of the Eastern Cape tragedy.
He hoped the investigation would shed light on the cause of the tragedy.
The reasons are not alien, Mr President. They are staring you in the face, and we wait to see you and your deputies fix it.
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