Another province in South Africa launches 24/7 traffic policing

The Mpumalanga province will launch a 24/7 shift schedule for traffic police this Friday, 1 November 2024.

This comes after recent videos emerged of taxi association patrol cars harassing motorists on the province’s roads for transporting more than one person in their vehicles.

Rogue taxi associations around South Africa have increasingly become an authority upon themselves in recent years and, by extension, motorists in the regions they operate.

They have been known to conduct unlawful roadblocks of private vehicles that carry one or more passengers and fining them hefty amounts for doing so, in certain cases thousands of rands per passenger, stating that it is the responsibility of the taxis to ferry commuters and not private cars.

In other cases, they “impound” the individual’s car through violence and intimidation and charge substantial fees of up to R2,500 for the release of said vehicle.

The video below, as posted to X by crime activist Yusuf Abramjee, shows the incident in question that reignited the calls for the authorities to step in and protect innocent motorists:

Taxi patrol car: this happened last week after the motorist apparently wanted to give a pedestrian a lift…

[WATCH] pic.twitter.com/UUy73lkn3F

— Yusuf Abramjee (@Abramjee) October 28, 2024

Fattening up the thin blue line

To address the growing culture of anarchy among taxi associations in Mpumalanga, the province is stepping up its law enforcement activities through the introduction of a 24/7 shift system.

“The Department of Community Safety, Security, and Liaison is concerned with the behaviour of our motorists on our roads, we condemn it in the strongest possible term it deserves. We are not going to fold our arms and watch what is happening because, at the end of the day, it causes unnecessary crashes and [takes] the lives of innocent people on our roads,” said Mpumalanga MEC Jackie Macie in a Newzroom Afrika interview.

“Hence, we have taken a step as a department that on Friday, the first [of November], we’re going to launch a 24-hour flex shift so that our law enforcers, in particular our traffic officers, will be in operation for 24 hours.”

Mpumalanga is the third traffic entity in the nation to adopt a 24/7 shift schedule, following in the footsteps of the national and the Western Cape traffic police.

The Department of Transport has said that it wants to extend this practice to all traffic departments in the country by 31 March 2025.

Delivering his inaugural address as the new Deputy Minister of Transport in July, Mkhuleko Hlengwa said he will remove all the roadblocks that have hamstrung the implementation of round-the-clock visible traffic policing during his tenure.

“This administration will speed up the resolution of all issues that have delayed the implementation of a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, and 365-days-a-year campaign visible traffic law enforcement across the country especially in highly accident-prone zones on our road network,” said Hlengwa.

“It is crucial that all provinces fast track their processes to obtain approval for the implementation of the shift system to ensure visibility of officers on the road daily and at all hours.”