As someone who has watched true crime documentaries almost daily, there are certain phrases that I have become accustomed to.
One of these is “a senseless death”.
It is often used to describe the murder of a truly innocent victim — someone who was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
It may be a victim who was killed in a case of mistaken identity or someone who died during the commission of a robbery, only for the criminals to walk away with nothing.
A senseless death.
It is an interesting way to characterise death, because many deaths are, to a degree, illogical.
Living in a country that has among the highest murder rates in the world, I know too well that most killings in SA are senseless.
The killings of children, the killings of people with albinism so their organs may be harvest for use as muti, the killings of women by their intimate partners, the road fatalities that occur during the Easter and the festive season, the killings of undocumented immigrants ... for many murders in our country there is no rhyme or reason.
But recently, the most senseless of these deaths occurred.
A human being who should never have died lost her life at the hands of a careless government.
A year ago, KwaZulu-Natal was battered by devastating floods that claimed hundreds of lives and caused damage to infrastructure amounting to billions of rand.
Roads and stormwater infrastructure in particular was significantly damaged.
While efforts to repair this infrastructure damage are under way a year later, there are many areas in KwaZulu-Natal that still bear the scars of that catastrophic ecological disaster.
One such area is eNhlungwane, near the township of Ntuzuma, about 12km from the eThekwini central business district.
This region of eThekwini suffered very severe damage.
On Saturday last week, 26-year-old Noxolo Khumalo was visiting the area for the Easter weekend.
As she drove along damaged roads, she was unaware that the eNhlungwane Bridge had been severely damaged by the floods and that a gaping hole now stood in its place.
As a result, she drove right off the road, plummeting several metres below into the hole below.
She died on impact, with massive trauma to her body.
But the horror of this story does not end there.
Moments before her death, members of the community came running towards her car, shouting to her in a desperate bid to warn her of the danger ahead.
But she mistook their frantic shouts as an attempt to force her to stop and then hijack her.
As a result, the young woman accelerated towards the gaping hole that was not visible to her at the time.
Ntuzuma has a high crime rate and hijackings are common in the area.
Noxolo was justified to think that she was being hijacked — it is something most of us, particularly women, would have thought had we seen strangers running towards us in an unfamiliar area.
Noxolo died because a year after the floods, the governments of eThekwini and KwaZulu-Natal have not built a link road at eNhlungwane Bridge.
Furthermore, there are no clear barricades and the signage is poor.
She died because she was afraid to stop for strangers who were trying to help her.
And she was afraid because it’s impossible to be a woman and not live in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety in SA.
She died because she had wanted to live.
I have heard of painful senseless deaths in our country.
But this particular death shattered me.
Noxolo should not have died.
Her death was cruel, unfair and downright senseless.
HeraldLIVE