Bajaj Vehicles Are Death Traps-Mandela

Mayibuye Melisizwe Mandela Concerned citizen of the Republic of South Africa

By Mayibuye Melisizwe Mandela
Concerned citizen of the Republic of South Africa

The lives of Black and working-class people in this country are not disposable.

Bajaj vehicle photo supplied

Yet our people are being forced into Bajaj vehicles that are bolt on our roads, even on our highways, where danger is constant, accidents are inevitable, and enforcement is unreliable.

These flimsy machines are not transport—they are death traps disguised as mobility, and the state is allowing it.

So I ask the Minister directly: when you look at this, Minister Creecy, what do you see?

Do you see ordinary people being crushed by poverty, ignored by law, and treated as expendable?

Or do you see the risk that any parent, any human being, would refuse to expose their own family to?

We demand answers:

what exactly are Bajaj vehicles in South African law?

Cars, motorbikes, quadricycles, or something else? Under which legislation are they authorised?

Who approved their use? What crash-testing, safety regulations, and passenger-protection standards apply?

Or is it only the poor, the working class, and the forgotten who are expected to be human crash-test dummies?

Let there be no doubt: our people are not experiments.

This is criminal negligence and state betrayal.

We reject the normalisation of unsafe, downgraded transport simply because it is cheap.

We demand safe, dignified, fully regulated transport for every passenger, regardless of class or income. Anything less is injustice.

Minister Creecy, when you see these Bajaj on our roads, when you see them even on our highways, what do you feel?

Are you accountable, or are our people just statistics to you?

We will not whisper.

We will not wait.

We are watching.

We demand answers.

We demand action.

And we will not accept excuses.