At least 151 people died in road accidents over the Easter weekend, according to preliminary figures released by the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) on Tuesday.
“We are currently busy crunching the numbers … at this point in time we will sit with the number of 151 until we get the full reports from the various police stations around the country,” RTMC spokesperson Ashraf Ismail told South African Broadcasting Corporation radio news.
One of the biggest accidents was on the road between Rouxville and Smithfield in the Free State, where eight people, including five children, were killed on Monday morning.
In the North West, five people were killed in different car crashes.
Four were killed in a head-on collision on Sunday at about 10:30pm between Odi Hospital and Klipgat after the driver of a Ford Meteor drove into oncoming traffic leading to the head-on collision with an ambulance.
In the second accident, a driver of a VW Polo was killed when his vehicle collided head-on with a VW Golf outside Vryburg on Thursday night.
The driver who was killed was allegedly driving on the wrong side of the road when the collision happened.
On Friday, 11 people died on the N4 near Ngodwana in Mpumalanga when two minibus taxis collided head-on just after midnight.
In the Eastern Cape, a two-month-old baby and man died in a head-on collision outside Uitenhage in the early hours of Friday morning.
A 23-year-old man died in an accident at about 6:30am outside Butterworth in the Eastern Cape.
In Gauteng, one person died and eight others were injured on the province’s R82 road near Walkerville, when a taxi collided head-on with a bakkie at 7am.
Another man died when a taxi and a car collided head-on, along Moloto Road in Pretoria.
Two men died when the bakkie they were travelling in crashed into a tree in Willowmore, Johannesburg on Friday at 7pm.
In the Free State, a 13-year-old boy was killed in a collision on the N3 near Warden. His parents sustained minor injuries.
The Department of Transport said high traffic volumes were anticipated across the country, particularly the N1 south-bound highway from Polokwane to Pretoria, the N4 West from Nelspruit to Pretoria as well as the N3 highway from Durban to Johannesburg.
Roads were also expected to be busy on April 27 as well as during the coming weekend. – Sapa