Editorial: Zero tolerance on drunk driving

THE menace of drunk drivers on South Africa’s roads has been rammed home in the past few days and once again placed their hazardous and often deadly behaviour under scrutiny.

Two incidents – more than four years apart – have highlighted the deeply disturbing mindset of motorists who get behind the wheel in an intoxicated state with utter disregard for the consequences of their actions.

On the one hand you have a senior public prosecutor – a supposed pillar of rectitude – being fined for driving under the influence, and on the other, the devastating death and serious injury of young pedestrians, the victims of an allegedly drunk hit-and-run driver.

The fact that the prosecutor was arrested and charged in 2011 and that yet another heartbreaking and unnecessary tragedy where alcohol is suspected to be involved happened just last weekend – the latest in a catalogue of road carnage – speaks volumes about progress, or lack thereof, in changing motorists’ attitudes.

While we believe a R4 000 fine for prosecutor Clive Killian, who was almost four times over the legal limit, is a mere slap on the wrist, magistrate Andre Aucamp quite rightly gave the high-ranking representative of our justice system a severe dressing down for his irresponsible and potentially lethal actions.

A vehicle in the decidedly unsteady hands of an inebriated driver becomes, quite literally, a weapon of possible mass destruction with other law-abiding road users helpless against it, no matter how careful they are.

There has to be a hardening of law enforcement and an unequivocal message must be sent out by the courts.

Zero tolerance and meting out much tougher punishment are the essential mechanisms to dramatically shift the way many people appear to trivialise a gravely serious and unacceptable transgression of the law which can and does destroy lives.