Soshanguve Venture Taxi Drivers and Some Nurses Must Catch A Wake Up!

Tlaki Baloyi

It is a normal Saturday and I am just chilling in our garden at home reading a magazine. Out of the corner of my eye I see a white Toyota Venture stopping on the edge of the road. This doesn’t trouble me much as it is a normal sight in Soshanguve. Toyota Ventures are the common form of reliable, fast transport here.

There is a down side though, some of their drivers have no licenses and often cause accidents. Now what am I on about you might ask, well let’s go back to me sitting under that tree in our home in Soshanguve on a Saturday afternoon.

Suddenly from the corner of my eye I see a child appearing. He was in front of the vehicle. Then from nowhere another car hit the child.

That was when I stood up to see whether he was okay. Nothing. Is he dead? Still nothing. This is a township on a Saturday afternoon and you can imagine everyone stopping whatever they were doing to see what was going on the side of the road. They were all now making their own assumptions about what could have happened and who was to blame.

Back to the child. Is he okay? Nothing. And then suddenly something. He is okay … he is alive. The driver got out of his car to check what the situation was like. I found that unusual as I thought most drivers would run after doing such, but maybe it’s because this one knew that he had done nothing wrong.

The child had sustained just a few bruises. The driver managed to locate his family and they quickly rushed the child to a clinic.

I was thinking to myself why can’t Venture drivers be that kind. But let’s not get side-tracked here.
Two days later the child’s wounds started swelling which surprised the parents because this child had received treatment from a professional health care worker. That baffled everyone as the results from a licensed nurse were supposed to be totally different from the result.

A question often raised by many is that health care workers do not do their jobs with professionalism that they used to. We see it all the time on TV and read about it on newspapers. Recenlty Gauteng Health and Social Development MEC, Qedani Mahlangu, was on Metro FM saying she is shocked by the lack of safety gear worn by nurses in hospitals. She even said she is tired of the myriad of uniforms she sees in some hospitals and promised that the nursing profession will return to its former glory with her at the helm of the health sector in the province. These statements were made after 17 babies died in two Gauteng hospitals.
Nurses often blame the state for not providing enough to help the patients. But I believe they should do the best they can no matter what the conditions are.

But with this in mind let me give a one-woman applause to those few good nurses, those who serve their patients with passion and patience, nurses who work tirelessly to put the lives of their patients before their own.

Let me again put my hands together for those few venture drivers out there who are considerate and treat their passengers and other road users with respect whilst abiding by the rules of the road.