End of an era coming for anyone who drinks alcohol and has a driving licence in South Africa
The government is pushing ahead with its plan to remove any tolerance for drinking and driving in South Africa.
Minister of Transport Barbara Creecy said the government is pursuing legislative amendments to move towards a strict 0% blood alcohol policy as part of efforts to improve road safety.
The legislative amendments will be made to Section 65 of the National Road Traffic Act.
The change would see the blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) limit in the National Road Traffic Act be reduced from 0.05 grams per 100 millilitres to 0.00g/100ml.
The breath alcohol concentration limit would be cut from 0.24g/1,000ml also to zero.
Bobby Ramagwede, CEO of the Automobile Association of South Africa (AA), said that while the AA supports efforts to reduce the country’s high number of road crashes, changing the law alone would have little impact without proper enforcement.
“Making the limit go down to zero would certainly make it easier to determine who’s had something to drink versus who hasn’t had something to drink,” Ramagwede said.
“But the reality of it is that, in the absence of real enforcement, whether the limit is zero or 0.1 makes absolutely no difference.”
He said the government needs to focus on enforcement across the country’s roads if it is serious about addressing alcohol-related crashes and dangerous driving.
“The simplest is to start with visibility. I often say that when the cat’s gone, the mice come out to play,” he said.
Ramagwede argued that a greater visible police presence would discourage not only drunk driving but a range of other traffic violations.
He said motorists’ behaviour would quickly change if they knew there was a strong likelihood of being stopped and tested.
“It’s as simple as a stroke of a pen from the government’s end. Enforce it, and you will quickly see that human behaviours will change.”
Active enforcement should be the priority
Ramagwede noted that several countries, including Venezuela, Japan and Norway, have adopted zero-tolerance alcohol policies.
However, he cautioned against attributing improvements in road safety in those countries solely to the lower alcohol limit.
“The challenge there is that many of these countries have active enforcement, and one would argue that it wasn’t the limit that caused the improvement in road fatalities and incidents, but actually the enforcement thereof,” he said.
He added that effective road safety also relies on a stronger social contract between citizens and the state, where people respect rules even when law enforcement is not immediately present.
However, Ramagwede stressed that alcohol enforcement is only one of several interventions needed to tackle South Africa’s road safety crisis.
The AA estimated that the country may be losing more than 50,000 lives annually through road accidents and related incidents, suggesting that the full scale of the crisis could be underreported.
“We’re of the view that we’re underreporting. We estimate that South Africa haemorrhages north of 50,000 lives a year due to road accidents and incidents,” he said.
He said the government has several other levers available, including improving road infrastructure and better separating vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians, from vehicles.
According to Ramagwede, nearly half of road deaths involve pedestrians. The AA CEO also called for more regular vehicle inspections, arguing that many cars on South African roads are unroadworthy.
“If we could have annualised roadworthiness inspections, we could at least have a good idea of the state of affairs of the condition of cars on our roads,” he said.
Ramagwede added that South Africa’s vehicle safety standards also lag behind international benchmarks. Ultimately, however, he said human behaviour remains a critical factor.
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