OPINION |Traffic cop deployment at holidays a waste of public funds

When former transport minister Sbu Ndebele launched the national traffic police (NTP) in 2011, he made some feeble and phantasmagoric statement that it is “a specialised intervention force that is now available for deployment to deal with any traffic situation in the country”.

The Road Traffic Management Corporation’s (RTMC's) website further states that “the RTMC Act aimed to establish the RTMC to pool powers and resources and to eliminate fragmentation of responsibilities in road traffic management across the various spheres of [the] government”.

Members of the NTP are generally based in Gauteng. However, they are usually deployed to other provinces during Easter, December holidays and any other period where high traffic volumes are expected in a particular province or city.

Be that as it may, their deployment to provinces, if not their existence, seems to fly in the face of one of the RTMC's objectives, namely: “to optimise the utilisation of public funds”. Their weekend deployment to various provinces doesn’t come cheap. First, their employer, the RTMC, has to bear the costs for their hotel accommodation, food and the travelling costs (fuel and vehicle maintenance).

This therefore begs the question: what happens to local and provincial traffic law enforcement officers whose territory gets invaded by the “super” NTP?

It is common cause that municipalities and provincial governments have their own traffic police units. Ironically, yet more confusing is that traffic officers training in the country is standardised. This means traffic officers receive the same training regardless of whether they are in the employ of the RTMC, provincial or local authority.

What, therefore, makes the NTP so special that they can incur these huge travel and accommodation costs just to perform duties that various local and provincial traffic authorities can undoubtedly perform since they have received the same training?

Are the NTP officers super human beings with the capability to prevent accidents from happening? Are traffic fines issued by the NTP more deterrent than those issued by local and provincial authorities?

If the answer to the above questions is no, then what justifies this expensive traffic law enforcement exercise? Is this not the same fragmentation that the RTMC Act sought to do away with? Can the NTP or RTMC identify at least one or two functions that local and provincial authorities are incapable of carrying out? If none, what justified their establishment and the expensive deployment to other provinces? A national intervention unit, I assume, would probably be made up of trained and experienced individuals.

Assuming the NTP, as a result of their training, is that super unit that it is made out to be, why are they not offering similar training to all traffic officers in the employ of both local and provincial governments? After all, the objective of traffic policing is the same for all traffic law enforcement agencies.

If that special training works for the NTP, surely it can work for other spheres of the government, if ever such exists. After all, providing support to other spheres of the government is one of the objectives of the RTMC.

The public money spent by the RTMC on the hiring of traffic officers, hotels, buying expensive and high-performance vehicles and any other equipment could have been put to good use.

As part of eliminating fragmentation, the money could have been used to support provincial and local authorities in terms of law enforcement technology, training, complimenting their law enforcement staff and also those high-performance vehicles. Municipalities, and not the Pretoria-based unit, are at the coalface of service delivery.

SA is losing a lot of money per year due to the general lawlessness on the roads and can, therefore, not afford this parochial aprioristic approach to traffic law enforcement.

• Dikgare is a former traffic police chief and a security policy wonk