LEARNER DRIVER FINED R30 000

Good grief! Why was her drivers licence not suspended? What kind of message are you sending out again. . . .

In my opinion, not only should her licence have been suspended, but she should have also been ordered to do say 100 hours of community work and the community work should have involved working with people who had been badly hurt in motor car accidents and were disabled as a result of that - nothing like a dose of cold, hard, reality to let the point really sink in!

Learner driver fined R30 000
March 12 2007 at 10:11AM
By Chris Makhaye

A South Coast learner driver was this week handed a R30 000 fine after she clocked 223-kilometre per hour on the N2. Scottburgh magistrate Mahendra Daya said the stepmother of 20-year-old student Lizanne Janse van Rensburg, the driver, was extremely negligent in allowing an unlicensed person to drive so fast and that she was lucky she had not also been charged. The fine is the second-highest meted out in KwaZulu-Natal. The highest fine, R31 000, was paid by Johannes Barkhuizen from Pretoria, who was fined R30 000 for travelling at 275-kilometres per hour on the N2 in 2005, and a further R1 000 for failing to stop.
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Janse van Rensburg, of Trafalgar, near Port Edward, was driving her parents' red BMW 330Ci with her stepmother when she was caught on camera near Park Rynie on Thursday. She was in a hurry to fetch her father, Andre, from Durban International Airport. The petite woman with a sleek, red shoulder-length bob was arrested and taken to Scottburgh police station, where she was granted R5 000 bail and ordered to appear in court the next day. Initially, Janse van Rensburg was charged with driving without a valid driver's licence, but the charge was dropped after it was found that her stepmother was with her at the time.

Janse van Rensburg recently returned to South Africa from Britain, where she spent two years travelling and working part-time.Now she works in her father's restaurant and sports bar in Trafalgar, 7th Heaven, a popular hangout for locals and bikers. A tearful Janse van Rensburg pleaded guilty to speeding. In court she was remorseful and was given a R30 000 fine, or two years in jail. She was ordered to pay R15 000 and the balance was suspended for five years. Her stepmother paid the fine in cash, shortly after sentencing. Daya said she must not be convicted of a speeding charge within the next five years. Her learner's licence was not suspended.

This article was originally published on page 1 of Tribune on March 12, 2007