Our town is full of mysteries.
New ones crop up every so often but it’s the enduring ones that fascinate me. Like how so many mainstream Academy award-winning movies reach every other movie theatre in the country but not ours.
The second enduring mystery is how the two annual national and international Jazz Festivals seem to catch so many homeowners unawares each year.
The biggest mystery, however, remains the total lack of repairs to the Carletonville road. In the three decades I have lived in this town, the Parys road has been redone many times, along with the Ventersdorp road. But the R501, which not only carries employees to work at Denel each day, but is the much-used route for hundreds of miners and other industrialists who commute between Klerksdorp, Potch, Carletonville and Rustenburg daily, has not been touched. Not once.
People who live on the road will tell you that even at midnight, it is a highway. Numerous trucking companies use it for their long-haul trips to avoid the weighbridge on the N12, rendering it not only a deathtrap for motorists but a significant destroyer of the infrastructure.
Yet nothing gets done.
It’s been well-described by some fellow townsmen as the Oupa-pad because of its facial cracks… as Fifty Shades of Grey because of the various ineffectual patches that adorn its length. Tragically, the most accurate description is Pad van die Dood. A local emergency services manager has told me that it has the highest overall fatality toll of any roads in the region.
Ja meneer, I see you rolling your eyeballs as you think, ‘Post ’94 government’…uh-uh. It was breaking up even before that. The current provincial government has simply followed an established pattern of neglect.
Is it going to take a mass tragedy before any funds are allocated to this death trap?