Collecting fines should be easy
SENIOR Superintendent Eugene Msomi rambles on about how impossible it is for the Ethekwini Municipality to collect outstanding taxi drivers’ fines. What poppycock. He should wander down to the eThekwini Electricity Department and take a note out of their book, where landlords are responsible for their tenants’ outstanding electricity bill.
The electricity solution is simple, don’t pay your electricity, we turn it off until it is paid.
The same rule should apply to the taxi owners.
Let them be responsible for their errant taxi drivers’ fines and pay them, otherwise haul the taxi off the road.
The positive results that will emanate from this action will be that taxi drivers will be selected more carefully, they will not commit so many infringements and violations and as a result the whole situation will improve.
If you read the back of any fine issued by the eThekwini Municipality it states that the responsibility of paying the fines, is the owner’s unless he can prove to the municipality that the fault was committed by somebody else and provide that somebody else’s details.
Msomi, you have all the power to achieve your objective. BIG AL DRYBURGH
Durban North THANKGod for the safe return of our citizens, Debbie Calitz and Bruno Pelizzari, after being kidnapped by Somali pirates and held captive for almost two years in a starvation and poverty bled country.
At the press conference, amidst the jousting and swopping of shared memories, the emotional cross-currents must have surely been tidal at times especially at their family reunion.
While the credit stakes are clouded at the moment, the family is presumed to have been at the heart of the negotiations, together with Somalia, South Africa, Rome and other community organisations.
I would like to know what role the ANC-led government had in rescuing this couple.
It is hoped that the press will give them a break to normalise before they are hunted down for their stories.
With dreams shattered and in urgent need of financial stability, they must be given a fair chance to tell their story to the medium of their choice: newspaper, magazine, film or book. Hopefully, their revelations will give South Africa’s military and combat strategists an insight into the modus operandi of these sea guerrillas.
For Debbie and Bruno, the future will indubitably take on an added richness, as if every day could be their last.
They have shown us, that in humility there is strength, strength that comes from tasting fear, from having flinched, from knowing with utter certainty that there is a power greater than their own.
I am equally sure that both must now realise that consciousness is real, not an illusion, not a fake. It doesn’t just give meaning to life… it preserves it. KEVIN GOVENDER
Shallcross