‘Name and shame culture will help outlaw serial overloaders’

RFA begins rollout of accreditation policy KEVIN MAYHEW THE ROAD Freight Association (RFA) will begin a national rollout of its Load Accreditation Programme (LAP) to tackle overloading through a greater emphasis on sector self-policing and encouraging compliance with load limits. New RFA chief executive officer, Sipho Khumalo, said the new initiative, to be introduced from next year, had been successfully piloted within the forestry industry and had reduced overloading by 5% in a year. “The overloading issue is a critical one and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Aside from the damage to infrastructure that overloading causes, I believe that we can reduce the trucking portion of the accident rate - and along with it the casualty rate - on our roads by up to 30%,” he explained. LAP calls for various sectors within the transport industry to introduce monitoring systems to check on overloading, from the consignee to the consignor and of course the transporter. Apart from overloading, the programme also monitors hours of work for drivers to overcome fatigue. “All parties involved in transportation should refuse to use overloaders by making certain that they know their goods are only put on vehicles that are within the limits and then refusing to receive goods from vehicles that are visibly overloaded. There must be a culture of name and shame and refusal to do business with serial offenders,” says Khumalo. Khumalo was reporting back to the media following visits to key stakeholders in his first month of office as RFA CEO. He said the organisation, which represents 620 members involved in the road freight industry, needed some adjustments to meet the challenge of remaining the transport sector’s pre-eminent representative body.