JOHANNESBURG - South Africa has a reputation for its dangerous, potholed roads but this has been eclipsed by new research that finds South African drivers are among the unsafest in the world.
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse says South Africa has the highest number of fatal accidents, just under 45 per 100,000 crashes.
That's a massive seven times the number of deadly accidents in the UK that the study says has the safest drivers.
Outa Andrea van Heerden said, "South Africa's roads are not safe, our country has complex challenges. If you look at the statistics the minister released for the period of the Easter Holidays, there was a 40-percent increase of road fatalities compared to last year’s Easter Holidays."
"So whether or not we compare to international countries as the UK, the reality is that road safety is an issue in the South Africa context."
"It’s a good indicator to know what’s out there internationally. Just for your information, South Africa is a signatory in the United Nations decade of road safety and the goal of that charter is to decrease road fatalities by 50-percent by 2030."
"South Africa undertook and signed the document, however, we are sitting in 2023 and we can’t see a big difference being made to date.”