The reduction of vehicular traffic during the Zion Christian Church Easter weekend pilgrimage

The Zion Christian Church (ZCC) is headquartered in the City of Polokwane at the heart of the province of Limpopo. Polokwane is a northern Sesotho word, meaning ‘place of safety’. The church is situated in the mountainous Zion City Moria (ZCM). The church hosts one of the largest mass gathering events on the African continent. The ZCC Easter weekend event attracts approximately 14 million pilgrims who are solely dependent on one mode of transport—vehicular transportation (Lekganyane 2019). Event organisers have a moral and legal obligation to plan for the safety of guests, starting months in advance (Hall et al. 2012). According to Lord (2008), the managers of a mass gathering event must understand their roles and responsibilities in terms of safety, risk and disaster management, including prevention and response. Event organisers must at least comply with relevant pieces of legislation, such as the Occupational Health and Safety Act (The OHS Act, No. 85 of 1993) and the Safety at Sports and Recreational Events Act (The SSRE Act, No. 2 of 2010). The SSRE Act applies directly to the planning and management of religious, cultural, exhibition, routes and similar events.

There is still a big penumbra in literature as to what characterises or constitutes a mass gathering. Researchers oscillate between 1,000 and 25,000 attendees (Mitchell et al. 1997). The World Health Organisation (WHO 2015) defines a mass gathering as ‘An organised or unplanned event where the number of people attending is sufficient to strain the planning and resources of the community, state or nation on hosting the event’. The ZCC pilgrimage has all the tenants of a mass gathering event according to the WHO definition. First, the event is well planned, as a result, the church uses tried and tested strategies and tactics to ensure the smooth running of the pilgrimage. Second, the event increases the high volume of traffic on the road which compels the state to deploy more resources such as health workers, emergency workers, traffic and security enforcement officers. Finally, the event takes place in the province of Limpopo where there is a high volume of traffic due to motorists who travel beyond ZCM to their homes in Limpopo and other neighbouring countries. The municipality is expected to create a ‘temporary city’ for pilgrims and to ensure the smooth running of traffic for other motorists.

Although the Polokwane Local Municipality (PLM) and the ZCC host one of the biggest mass gathering events on the African continent, it is notable that researchers and media have paid little or no attention to this African pilgrimage, which attracts over 14 million pilgrims during Easter weekend. The number of ZCC pilgrims is more than the combined inhabitants of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini; however, researchers have only focused on the Hajj and the Kumbh Mela as the two major MG events in the world. Once a year, 3.0 million Muslims from all over the world gather in Mecca to perform the Fifth Pillar of Islam, the Hajj, and over 120 million pilgrims attend the Kumbh Mela in India. The Hajj and the Kumbh Mela mass gathering events have received negative media attention due to pilgrims who die on their spiritual journey (The Guardian 2006). For example, in 2015, at least 87 pilgrims died and 184 got injured in Mecca during the Hajj when a construction crane crashed into a mosque. Within a few days, 719 pilgrims died and 800 got injured in a stampede (Mbhele 2015).

The Kumbh Mela is replete with several incidents; for example, there has been a fire before the start of Kumbh Mela 2019 in Allahabad, but no one was injured (Husain and Yusra 2019). Another disastrous incident in Kumbh Mela occurred in 1954 after India got their independence from Great Britain, injuring 1,000 people and scores of others whilst the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad was in progress (WHO 2008). On the other hand, the ZCC stands out for its better track record on the safety and the management of the pilgrimage. Notably, there has never been a stampede during the pilgrimage since the church's inception in 1910, thanks to several factors such as unalloyed loyalty of the congregants to the faith, the reverential respect given by the church members to their spiritual leader as well as the guardian of the faith and the church values that have been codified into the philosophy of operation. The ZCC pilgrimage receives little academic attention in academic discourse regardless of millions of pilgrims who throng at ZCM in Limpopo every Easter weekend to fulfil their spiritual needs.

The pilgrims who visit ZCM are exponentially increasing every year. For example, during the 2016 Easter Weekend; 12 million pilgrims were hosted at ZCM and during the Easter weekend of 2017, the number of pilgrims increased to 13 million (Lekganyane 1997). There is a great likelihood that several pilgrims are likely to reach 16 million in 2019. The buses, minibuses and private cars are solicitously parked in the Holy City of Moria by the volunteers under the supervision of the church management. After the pilgrimage, the traffic is ushered out of Moria systematically without the church members gate tailing one another. The culture of obedience is paramount among the ZCC membership. An aerial photo of Moria during the Easter weekend pilgrimage is shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1

The researcher adopted an action research approach by collaboratively engaging the PLM to diagnose the current problems and develop a management framework as well as a peak transport standard to propose worldwide development and adoption. The action research approach accords with collaborative management. The proposed framework aims to manage and reduce vehicular traffic, thereby reducing transport incidents before, during the pilgrimage, resulting in greater transport safety for all road users. The parking arrangements in ZCM are demonstrated in Figure 1.

The objectives of this study are to identify interventions that would contribute to:

designing a transportation self-assessment tool to measure and manage the ZCC Easter pilgrimage,

The Easter weekend is one of the busiest periods on South African roads in which roads are accident-prone. The government has been trying for years to put a form end to the scourge of road accidents; however, this situation remains unbridled (Mathebula and Smallwood 2019). The Zionists are not the only faith-based organisations (FBOs) who go on a pilgrimage during the Easter weekend by road, but other FBOs, migrant labourers, holidaymakers and all use vehicles to reach their destination. The current road infrastructure in South Africa was not designed to accommodate the high volumes of traffic. The ZCC pilgrims reach the ZCM on foot, by bicycle, car, taxi or bus; however, very few by train or aircraft. The mobility of pilgrims was confirmed in the Holy Quran. Hajj, 22:27 states: ‘And proclaim the Pilgrimage among men; they will come to you on foot and (mounted) on every kind of camel, lean because of journeys through deep and distant mountain highways’ (Quran 22:27–30) (Ali 1943). Road traffic causes route bottlenecks, driver fatigue and toilet bottlenecks, aggravated by tollgates. Easter weekend road incidents killed more than 100 people in 2019 (Worldometer 2019), with most incidents on highways near Polokwane in Limpopo province. The ZCC Easter pilgrimage poses a huge challenge to the host church and the municipality to prevent and manage potential deaths, injuries, diseases, stampedes, violence and crime.

Car ownership in South Africa has reached the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12%, as people plan their lives around cars. The International Transport Forum Road Safety Annual Report (ITFRSA) in 2013 reported that the motorised vehicle fleet in South Africa has doubled in the last 20 years, and the number of road fatalities has increased by 25% in the 21 years between 1990 and 2011 (OECD 2013). South African roads creak under the strain on Easter weekend. Pilgrims are likely to add more cars to the vehicle count each year, and suffer, or contribute to, more traffic incidents each year. Reform of mobility systems is one of the biggest challenges confronting South African policymakers, stakeholders, managers and passengers. Reform of transport on peak routes and to mass destinations in December, Easter and September, should be a joint priority, requiring an ambitious approach.

Millions of pilgrims come from all South Africa provinces, neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho, Eswatini, former Swaziland, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and some from overseas, such as Great Britain, Canada and Saudi Arabia. Local and regional services are temporarily disrupted by a large number of visitors. Demand for services exceeds supply. The roles of the government levels in event planning and management retain some grey areas in practice, despite the clarity that the SSRE Act, No. 2 of 2010 brought. Unclear roles, and uncertain compliance, are partly due to the ZCC's tightly knit and autocratic management structure, typical of FBOs. The Vatican in Rome is the smallest independent state in the world, with its government and services, including a bank. The history of monastic orders, such as the Templers, Hospitallers, Knights of Malta and others, confirms that religious organisations tend to be self-sufficient, as states within states, and to wield influence far beyond the cities within which their headquarters and pilgrimage sites are situated. Although a pilgrimage is an individual's spiritual journey in search of meaning, it ends up as a collective effort on several stakeholders.

Transport planning in South Africa has been criticised for being primarily vehicle-centric while relegating public and non-motorised transport (NMT) modes to the background (Bickford 2013). There is a patent reluctance to take real steps towards intermodalism. Since the White Paper on National Transport Policy published in 1996, there was an additional emphasis on prioritising the needs of public transport and non-motorised users. Walters (2012) argues that policies were established in separate silos for each mode of public transport, presenting a major challenge to spatial and operational integration, and thus increasing the cost of transportation. Research has demonstrated limited successes in implementing Travel Demand Management (TDM) strategies in South Africa (Del Mistro et al. 2007). TDM emerged as a reaction to predict demand and supply-based vehicle-oriented transport practices, at first merely to reduce private vehicle trips (Bickford 2013). The adoption of traditional vehicle transport planning practices in developing countries neglected non-vehicle trips and non-vehicle owners in planning and development of land use and transportation projects.

A pilgrimage involves travelling to and from a destination by various modes. Walking remains one of the major modes of transport in Asia and Africa (Gayathri et al. 2017). Saint Ramalingam, who is credited for reviving the main tenets of Hinduism, namely truth and love based on universal brotherhood, after Western influence first shook the foundation of Hinduism, went on a pilgrimage in 1855 to Southern India on foot, with his followers (Naidoo 1981). However, pilgrimages worldwide invariably use readily available modes of transport. The ZCC experienced rapid, exponential growth in membership, including in other countries and continents. Bishop B.E. Lekganyane in his 2014 Easter homily acknowledged the presence of representatives from Saudi Arabia (Lekganyane, 2014). The Limpopo Tourist Attraction website describes Easter weekend as a time of the year to avoid the N1 and R101 highways from Gauteng ‘as they are congested’.

South Africa has 17 major transport planning authorities, including the National Department of Transport 9 provincial and 7 metropolitan departments as well as numerous local transport authorities. Bosman and Slabbert (2016) argue that the transformation of the four provinces into nine provinces in 1994 resulted in nine provinces with damaged transportation DNA. They noted that good interventions paved government policies since 1994, while transportation statistics painted bleak pictures of governance, with the following dire implications for society, business and development:

Freight logistic costs at 12.8% of GDP, about 50% higher than the USA and 20% higher than Brazil;

Mitchell and Walters (2011) attribute South Africa's lack of success in transport policymaking to:

Poor leadership in provincial governments;

The lack of a comprehensive national policy for the ZCC Easter pilgrimage creates a burden for the national government, Limpopo province, the Capricorn District, the PLM, the host and the public to cope with various impacts of a temporary vehicle fleet and city for 18 million pilgrims. Electronic urban tolling is one of the recent interventions to manage traffic and raise revenue for infrastructure, but the public and labour unions resist toll fees, and the expensive infrastructure, and overseas suppliers and royalties involved, and they say that government, South African National Road Agency (SANRAL), and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) avoided public consultation, thus adding to the culture of non-payment and blocking the development of new ancillary roads and other traffic calming strategies.

The PLM has the added dilemma that in that the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (Act No. 108 of 1996) mandates the local government to serve and charge local communities, not visitors per se. The ZCC Easter pilgrimage forces the PLM to play host to road users. The PLM had no mandate to be involved in managing any aspect of rail, or mass gatherings sites, before the SSRE Act. The PLM officials did not even mention this Act during the entire active research process, despite providing a specific process for the police, local government, and mass gathering hosts to co-operate in planning and managing events. But legislative aspects of pilgrimage transportation are not yet in place since the SSRE Act does not provide for joint policy, planning, or management of mass event transportation, or transit incident response, thus these crucial aspects of mass gatherings remain ‘externalised’ to general traffic and incident response legislation and institutions.

The ZCC Easter pilgrimage remains road-based, while the Hajj is fully intermodal and synergistic, including air, rail, taxis and buses. Kumbh Mela pilgrims also travel by air, road, rail and on foot. Canada (2001) defines a sustainable transportation system as:

allowing basic access needs of individuals and society to be met safely, in a manner consistent with human and ecosystem health, and with equity in and between generations;

Firth (2015) suggests that 10 key thrusts in policy to regulate any service sector: focus on customer needs; meet basic needs; enable financial sources and return on investment (RIO); maintain the low cost for a given level of service; safety; security and consumer protection; integration; develop human resources; ensure competition; broaden participation in the economy and lower environmental impact. But South Africa still follows the old paradigm of transport planning, restricted to moving people and goods by available means.

The economic cost of South Africa's road vehicle crashes is estimated at R307-billion per year (OECD 2013). The OHS Act (Act No. 85 of 1993), and its Regulations, does not advise employers on the cost of preventing a fatality or the full cost of suffering a fatality and assumes that transportation incidents are externalised. This Act, drafted and amended in consultation with employer bodies in construction, manufacturing and other industries, reveals low willingness to pay (WTP) for loss prevention and high assumptions of externalisation.

South Africa is a signatory to the current United Nations (UN) Decade of Action for Road Safety, 2011–2020; however, its incident rates, and loss severity rates, have worsened, and its private road fleet is growing. At the first global Road Safety conference in Russia in 2009, the Decade of Action for Road Safety was adopted by the Ministers of Transport of member states. Based on the Millennium Developmental Goals of 2006, the Road Traffic Safety Management Plan aimed to halve the transportation fatal incident rate in 9 years, by 2015. This goal was not achieved and stands contradicted. Sustainable Development Goals number 3.6 and 11.2, aim at affordable and safe transport systems by 2030 (ICSU and ISSC 2015) The current UN Decade of Action ends in 2020, yet managerial interventions, such as Arrive Alive, road upgrades, toll roads, urban toll roads and new driver licensing regimes, did not bring noticeable reductions to the rising rates of loss. At the same time, some smaller vehicles have been found lacking in safety features, as manufacturers use high fuel prices and consumer awareness of environmental impacts to reduce the cost of vehicle design and manufacture. Vehicle safety was once an important sales feature, but frequent model recalls and some models tending to burst into flame reveal changing design priorities.

The researchers decided to employ an action research strategy to the study since the researchers could not impose the solution to the organisation under study, but to come up with a collaborative solution. Nieuwenhuis (2015) enhances the justification for the action research strategy. The aims of action research are better explained by two verbs, namely, action and research, the action component is to bring about a radical change in some community or organisation and the research part seeks to increase understanding on the part of the researcher and/or the community or organisation. Dick (1993) argues that there are action research methods where the focal point is on action, with research as dividends or a fringe benefit. This study is more on the action rather than on research as its aim is to bring about change in some communities or organisations or programmes. Responsiveness and rigour are the virtues of action research (Reason 2001).

The high volume of vehicular traffic to ZCM during the Easter weekend is a challenge to motorists, pilgrims, communities and the three spheres of government. The researchers used the seven-step model proposed by Van Tonder and Dietrichsen (2008) as graphically demonstrated in Figure 2 below. The justification of the model is that it is aligned with the action research model of Organisational Development (OD). It requires that a diagnosis process should be collaborative and participative towards offering solutions to organisational challenges as opposed to imposing a unilateral theoretical generated solution. This model also fits the ontological stance of the researchers which assumes that reality is co-constructed through engagement.

Fig. 2

The researchers purposively or judgmentally selected people who knew about the issue under study (Polit and Beck 2012). Houser (2018) opines that convenience sampling has an added benefit over probability samples about logistics and cost. The following were the key inputs: (1) semi-structured interviews were used to interview the senior management representatives whose responsibilities included the joint planning and the execution of the ZCC pilgrimage and (2) the services and the infrastructure that are provided by the municipality for the smooth running of the pilgrimage were discussed with the senior municipality representative. The PLM also discussed its disaster management plans, traffic flow plans and transport planning with the researchers. The rapport building elements are vital in establishing the relationship between trust and credibility during this phase.

The goal of the first phase was to deconstruct and contextualise the ZCC Easter weekend pilgrimage and the level of participation in the pilgrimage by the PLM. The following outputs emerged from this phase: a detailed account of how PLM participants in the ZCC Easter weekend pilgrimage in both ZCC churches, evidence of traffic and disaster management plans, Integrated Development Plan (IDP) as well as the PLM organisational structure with the view to assessing the capacity of the municipality to deliver the biggest pilgrimage on the African continent. Table 1 depicts the demographic profile of the respondents who participated in the study.

The following themes were identified throughout the research process as well as the required interventions:

It is highly impossible for 15 million pilgrims to use only aircraft, or trains, or vehicles, and impossible for any single mode to enable the PLM and Limpopo province to transport all their people and goods, and compete economically, and employ all their people. But these three modes could integrate with Limpopo to sustain the pilgrimage and achieve the broader aims, which would incidentally result in road upgrades, transport hubs and better bus and taxi businesses all year round. A pilgrim train would be a major ZCC public transportation and business legacy from its inception, particularly to the PLM townships, and to all enterprises along the N1 highway. One of the factors of success in transport ventures is predictable usage. The ZCC pilgrimage remains a golden opportunity for transportation authorities, operators, hosts and organised business, to transform an annual roads nightmare into a daily economic enabler. The vision of making rail a preferred mode of transport, articulated in the Green Paper on National Rail Policy, is partly achieved, but only in Gautrain and some township routes. But the vision of becoming convenient and safe elements of a multi-modal transportation system is achievable and urgent due to bottlenecks at mass events, and around bottlenecks around all the major centres, notably Durban, and due to long distances to holiday or weekend destinations, notably KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and Western Cape. Safety, volume, speed, capacity, frequency in restricted areas and lower carbon footprint are among the reasons that railways play crucial roles in the developed countries. Railways are urgently required to take their place in developing inter-modality in developing countries. All modes of transport must operate in a synergy, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘joint working... in cooperation’. Synergy, ironically, also defines one aspect of the pilgrimages. An intermodal transportation system would from inception reduce traffic congestion and road accidents, currently tragic in their predictability.

Transport planning in South Africa had created and sustained myopic identity and marketing for all transport providers, by defining them by their modes, instead of by the service of transportation. The PLM and the ZCC pilgrimage are outmoded in transportation, data, health, safety, disaster, integration, planning and managerial systems, compared to the Hajj, where a dedicated railway line transports approximately 72,000 pilgrims per hour to various rotational locations, a task impossible for buses, where vehicle and pedestrian facilities are integrated. Railways could not and should not compete with other modes, but ease their burdens and bottlenecks, such as peak passenger numbers in restricted land areas. The ZCC hosts many more pilgrims than Mecca yet has no rail facilities. Its major challenge is the density of buses, taxis and cars on the N1 freeway and R71 highway. Lord Butler, former British Cabinet Secretary, reportedly told the Royal College of Defence Studies in 2011 that every department should have a historical adviser. History teaches well but finds few managerial students. Bus and minibus operators in South Africa are now suffering from identity and marketing myopia, seeing themselves bound to buses and taxis, instead of seeing the transportation business. The South African National Taxi Association Company (SANTACO), some years ago, considered launching or hiring an air service to the Eastern Cape to overcome weekend distance and road strictures, and to boost transport growth, but aviation is a fickle business. SANTACO might realise that a combination of taxis and buses serving both ends of high-speed provincial rail sections, particularly in low population areas, such as the Karoo, and through mountain tunnels, may fulfil their provincial ambitions. Briefly put, taxi operators and transport authorities live in the era of abundant opportunities, but fail to see transportation with holism, which is ‘a tendency to see the connection between diverse things’. (Zohar and Marshall 2000). The ZCC demonstrates some holism in responding to the need for religion, ethics, identity, culture, economic activity and jobs, but they have stopped short on buses.

The study has shown that transport planning in South Africa is vehicular-centric. Other modes of transport could reduce traffic congestion on the roads, during Easter weekend. Saudi Arabia has attempted to adopt a proactive approach in its planning process. The government spent SR 6.5 billion to construct the 18 km Mashir railway line. The Chinese-built monorail links Mecca with holy sites at Mina, Mount Arafat and Muzdalifah. There are 20 trains with a capacity of 3,500 pilgrims per trip. The trains transport 72,000 pilgrims per hour, and over 6 h move 377,000 pilgrims from Mecca to Mina, then to Arafat. The number of pilgrims who use the Mashir train has been reduced from its actual capacity of 500,000–377,000 as a safety measure. As an added benefit, the Mashir has created 4,000 seasonal jobs for young people to work as security guards. Each train consists of 12 cars with a driver cab at each end. Each car is equipped with Passenger Information Display System, CCTV and a system to provide audio and visual communications between pilgrims and the train operating staffs. These trains are designed to operate in automatic mode (driverless); however, each train has a crew of two drivers and additional passenger attendance available who are there during the Hajj operations (Saudi Railway Commission 2014).

Figure 3 is a transport management framework for PLM. The framework below depicts the improvement required, interventions as well as the linkages. Performance measurement is a confluence of goals, standards and targets catalysed with efficiency or effectiveness. In the framework, performance measurement is linked to performance management through the setting of goals, standards and targets for improving the performance of the municipality.

Fig. 3