Motorists in the City of Mbombela (CoM) should expect more delays on the road during this load-shedding period, due to a considerable shortage of traffic officers.

The spokesperson for the CoM, Joseph Ngala, admitted there could never be enough traffic officers due to the sheer number of motorists and roads in the province.

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“We do deploy traffic officers as and when the situation calls for them. We can never have enough, as this depends on the enormity of the problem. With stage 4 load-shedding being normally declared unplanned, the municipality can only concentrate on the major routes within the city to avoid congestion,” said Ngala.

Moeti Mmusi, the spokesperson for the Mpumalanga Department of Community Safety, Security and Liaison, echoed Ngala’s sentiments, and said this was due to the delay in recruiting new officers when existing ones resign or leave the department.

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“At present, we are in the process of recruiting more traffic officers, and we believe that they will be useful when we come across such a situation in the future. At the moment, we are pleading with motorists to drive cautiously. They must treat traffic lights as stop signs when they are not working, especially in those areas where we did not deploy our officers,” he said. Mmusi added that at the moment, they deploy traffic officers where there is a high volume of cars, since they cannot be everywhere at once. Motorists need to be patient with one another and plan their trips accordingly to avoid being late.