The Gauteng Education Transport (GET) and Road Accident Fund (RAF) held an advanced defensive driving workshop for learner transporter drivers at DH Williams Hall, 2097 Gumede Street, Admin Section, Katlehong, on May 12.
The advanced driving workshop, facilitated by Skina Ramawela from FleetMax, aimed to equip learner transporters with defensive driving skills and safety skills on the road.
Ramawela’s training session focused on defining the need for advanced defensive driving, the qualities of an advanced driver and the 14 rules of defensive driving.
Ramawela said advanced defensive driving is about drivers making sure that they are always safe and keep safe their surroundings because not everyone is competent on the road.
According to Ramawela, defensive driving involves utilizing both physical and mental skills to ensure a safety margin around the driver to prevent and avoid potential hazards.
He said South Africa has an unacceptable high crash rate, adding an average of 14 000 people per annum are killed on our roads.
“The crashes cost the economy R143-billion per annum,” said Ramawela.
According to GET provincial training officer Tokelo Mbele, it is a privilege to get programs from RAF as it resuscitates GET.
He explained that GET’s structure was no longer in place after a fall-out in 2009. It was revived in February 2022.
“These programs from RAF bring awareness and train us and the drivers on how we need to behave on the roads because we are carrying lives.
“There is more training to come because we have had many incidents – not only in our industry but everywhere in the country,” said Mbele.
When asked whether this program will be a regular feature for GET, Mbele said that the program started in the Johannesburg region and moved to Ekurhuleni.
He said the program is being rolled out to the whole province.
“We want to do this training practicality so that people can see the relationship between the driver and his motor vehicle and what to do in case of emergency.” he continued.
“It is not in the pipeline yet, but it is something that we are talking about for future training because we need it,” Mbele concluded.
One of the learner transporters, Mashaba from KETO Spruitview said the workshop was an eye-opener because they could ask questions.
“We were able to cover a lot of topics, and can foresee where we will encounter challenges while transporting children to school,” said Mashaba.
The Ekurhuleni regional chairperson of GET, Paul Malatsi said this project is vital.
He said they witnessed a 10-car pile-up at Buhle Park of which vehicles belonged to school transporters.
“The program is making people aware of the dangers on the road and is very important, especially to us because we are carrying small kids,” said Malatsi.
He said the program should be ongoing because only the executives were addressed.
“It should also go to members because they have a huge following and some of these drivers are not trained. We hire drivers who sometimes do not even care about the business.
“I think it should be something that the government should take to other provinces and not only in Gauteng,” he said.
Busisiwe Selahlwa the DC chairperson of Gauteng transport services and chairperson of Keto Palmridge told Kathorus MAIL that their members do not have advanced driver’s licenses yet. The workshop was excellent and we needed it to train operators on the daily challenges on the road, she explained.
“There is quite few a challenges we encountered due to unregistered operators. We do have a lot of road rage, and sometimes you would think of stopping your car to reprimand another driver because you see them doing wrong things.
“Today we were taught to calm down and not teach people a lesson as there will be a proper platform for that,” said Selahlwa.
She called on all unregistered operators to join the regulated associations to run their businesses in harmony and uniformity.
Ramawela said they provide practical driving training at either Swartkops or Gerotek. depending on the number and the cost.
