On Mozambique Transport Crisis Exposed As Fake

Maputo — According to a video widely distributed on social media, the crisis in Mozambican public transport is now so bad, that desperate would-be passengers are clambering into buses through the windows.

A shocking video shows a woman being hauled into a bus through a window, assisted by a passenger already inside the vehicle who takes advantage of the situation to grope intimate parts of the women's anatomy.

On YouTube, the video carries the caption "Public transport in Mozambique is woeful!'

But the video is fake. Or at least the caption is fake, since the video was not filmed in Mozambique. The fact checking unit of the Mozambican chapter of the regional press freedom body, MISA (Media Institute of Southern Africa), investigated the video and found that it comes, not from Mozambique, but from South Africa.

The incident filmed is genuine, but it happened in Cape Town, during the recent strike by minibus taxis. The taxi drivers took their vehicles off the roads on 3 August, in response to a new traffic law, under which a motorist found driving a vehicle with irregularities, would have to pay a fine and his vehicle would be seized.

The South African National Taxi Council (Sanco) protested vigorously, most taxis stopped running and many passengers found themselves deprived of their normal form of transport.

Desperate travelers tried to cram into overcrowded Cape Town buses, sometimes by climbing in through the windows. The alternative, in the absence of the taxis, would have been to walk home.

So this YouTube video depicts a transport crisis, not in Mozambique, but in South Africa.

MISA remarks that "any attempt to link this video with Mozambique, is nothing more than an exercise in the manipulation of the real context in which events happen'.

This article first appeared on News Agency Mozambique

Photo: Wikimedia