The traffic department, in its wisdom, has decided to solve the problem of congestion on the N1 corridor between the crucial Gauteng centres of Johannesburg and Tshwane (still known to most people as Pretoria) by turning the former speed freak outside lane into an exclusive lane for vehicles with more than one passenger.
On the surface this seems like a good idea. The N1 has become a day-long headache, with traffic crawling in both directions, if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky it stops dead altogether. You sit alone in your fancy car and watch the fuel gauge steadily dropping towards zero while you are getting nowhere — and the next filling station is not even on the horizon.
It’s a strange, consumerist society we live in. Someone twiddles a button on the other side of the world, in Malaysia, in Miami or in Saudi Arabia, and the price of gas soars. We boast that, thanks to apartheid-era sanctions, we have the most effective and sophisticated oil-from-coal industry in the world and can meet our own domestic demands, so yah, boo and sucks to the international community and its prissy liberalism. Our coal mines can provide enough fossil fuel energy to keep the nation on the move.
And yet, as soon as the international oil price rises, our domestic fuel prices rise accordingly. Who can explain this?
The same is true of Africa’s oil producing countries — places such as Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria, for example. What has oil production done to make these countries self-sufficient in this lethal, but now essential, commodity? Stories pile up, one on top of another, about explosions in Nigerian oil fields when local communities take advantage of leaky oil pipelines, which run from the wells to the ports where they will fill up international tankers taking the black gold to refineries in Europe and America.
Maintenance and security are so bad that whole areas of marshland are literally awash with the sticky fluid and people wade in, dressed in their rags of poverty, to scoop up as much of it as they can with buckets, cooking pots, plastic bottles or whatever else is to hand. What they plan to do with it, I do not know. Maybe they put it directly into their motor scooters and ride off to market, loaded with an impossible burden of wares. Maybe it works. Maybe oil doesn’t need to be refined to become useful after all. Maybe this whole refining thing is another Western trick, a plot to keep us in the dark all over again. The oil is ours. Let it become a fanfare for the common man.
In the meanwhile, the oil producing countries of Africa, contrary to all expectations, remain desperately poor. Dubai and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf of Arabia used their oil wealth to transform their poor desert countries into oases of wealth and learning, harbingers of new technology; lush resorts bloom out of the inhospitable desert and state of the art centres of development have tentacles that reach across the world. The Arabs suddenly bought up the Third World, and, as musician Gil Scott-Heron put it, were putting down a firm down-payment on the First World.
Oil wealth, meanwhile, has done nothing but uplift a handful of corrupt and corruptible individuals in Angola, Nigeria and the rest. Something has gone awry. And, as I say, the best the poor get out of it — as they try to scoop up the black stuff leaking from oil pipelines — is a raging fire that sweeps away all before it, sparked off by some damn fool stopping to light up a quick spliff while he toils in the impromptu oil fields, and bringing death and destruction where, for generations, there has been nothing else. It is only the source of this Armageddon that has changed. The explosion that erupts from a throwaway match is merely the catalyst for a more modern way of dying.
But back to the home front. Yes, indeed. Not only has our acclaimed oil-from-coal industry failed to make us self-sufficient, nay, bursting with pride and the energy to transform our poorest communities into well lit, well heated, humming centres of creativity, it cannot even guarantee that we can fill our cars (if we manage to get to the pumps at all through this immobilised traffic, with the needle on the fuel gauge dipping steadily below the red line). Not only that — we, the consumers, the N1 corridor commuters, don’t care.
No, siree, Bob. We sit, fuming in self-important frustration — ‘one car, one person” the slogan that we vote by — and let it all unravel. What kind of economy we, or our betters who rule over us, think we are developing with this mode of living beats the living daylights out of me. I can only see the bottom dropping out of my pocket book, and out of the pocket books of the rest of the country, too.
And so, as progress sits gridlocked on the N1, trying to rival Los Angeles in its ugly, lethargic, gas-guzzling meander to nowhere, the traffic department fiddles while the fuel supply burns to nothing. Their solution, as I said, is to allow only the goody-goody drivers with more than one person in the vehicle to travel at full speed in the fast lane. This, they say, includes public transport, such as buses and minibus taxis.
Don’t look out for fuel savings or less congestion. Look out for more mayhem.