The North West Transport Investment (NTI) has condemned the torching of its nine buses at the Moretele village, near Makapanstad.According to the entity, the buses were burned in the early hours of Monday morning at a sleeping ground. Speaking on YouFM News Hour, NTI’s spokesperson Freddy Sepeng, said they don’t know the motive for this cowardice act and have since opened a case with the police. “We received a call from the security around 2am that one of the buses is burning at the sleeping ground in Moretele village. When we arrived there, we found that nine buses had burned. At this stage, we don’t know how the fire started, how they were burnt, and we have opened a case with the police,” said Sepeng.According to Sepeng, there were four security guards at the sleeping ground on duty, but could however not extinguish the fire, because of the small size of the fire extinguishers. He said they had to call-in the fire brigades to assist, as the fire trucks had to be dispatched from Makapanstad to Moretele. Sepeng said the circumstances in which the buses burnt are suspicious. “What surprises the entity is that the buses use diesel, and when you torch it, it burns slowly, but petrol burns quick, and buses use diesel. The speed that the buses burned is suspicious, but we don’t want to speculate and leave everything to the police,” explained Sepeng. Moreover, he said the entity is unable to quantify the damage caused but highlighted that each bus cost about R2 million. Due to the damage, Sepeng said they experienced a slight problem in the morning to ferry commuters around the Moretele Local Municipality but implemented contingency plans by sending some of their buses to resolve the situation. “Operations are running smooth, no disruptions,” remarked Sepeng. The entity will also launch its own investigations, to check if there were any mechanical or technical problems with the fleet. “We have a technical department that do weekly reports about all the buses.They have to check if the buses that burnt did have any problems, that could have caused it to burn. The last time it was inspected, whether it had any problem, then we’ll take it from there,” explained Sepeng.Meanwhile, the MEC for Community Safety and Transport Management, Wessels Morweng has condemned the incident and called for in depth investigations into the incident. “We have recently turned a new leaf with our intervention at the entity by addressing the leadership instability experienced for some time now. We have also ensured that employees received their salaries as promised. Therefore, we believe that we have made great effort to assist the entity in realising its full potential. This however is a set back and overall unfortunate incident,” said Morweng.
