BY FIONA MOTSA
MBABANE- Safe roads in 2023!
The Department for Road Safety under the Ministry of Public Works and Transport has assured the nation that it has already set strategies for ensuring road safety for 2023.
Giving advice during Kusile Breakfast Show on Eswatini TV today, Road Safety Council’s Tsembani Dlamini urged livestock farmers to keep their livestock off the roads which are a huge cause of road accidents.
Dlamini further mentioned their council would embark on Road Safety education programmes, whereby they would be teaching the public on road safety in different communities and schools to ensure that no lives were lost on roads this year.
“We ask that livestock farmers help us reach this goal by playing their part and keeping livestock off the road. Our first step is to go to different schools once they are open as a lot of pupils will be enrolling.
“We target the lower grades like the first grade to teach them how to cross roads with assistance from the police,” said Dlamini.
Dlamini further mentioned that people needed to be educated about road safety and their aim this year is to ensure that knowledge gets to them.
According to mva.org.sz/ road-safety/, globally, over 1.2 million people die annually as a result of road accidents.
In Eswatini, an average of 222 people die on the country’s road annually. This figure warrants an aggressive programme to counter the trends since without any interventions the country can lose a significant portion of the population which is currently at about 1.4 million.
Since the inception of the Road Safety programme in 1983, the country has employed several strategies to calm the escalating numbers of road traffic injuries.
The interventions have adhered to the three components of road safety which are namely education, enforcement and road safety audits.
It has been a reality though that between the years 1996 and 1999, the road accidents trends peaked to its highest and only dropped slightly after the initiation of an aggressive programme by the road safety stakeholders.
From the year 2000, the escalation of road crashes has challenged road safety stakeholders to re-strategize and be focused in order to reap the intended goals.
