National Assembly, 4 March 2004
Madam Speaker,
Let me use this opportunity to wish our comrade, Minister Dullah Omar, well and our trust that he will make a speedy recovery. Back in early January, we discussed with him the importance of calling for a public debate in the National Assembly on the challenges of road safety. I know that he would dearly have loved to be present and participating in this debate.
I have here a comprehensive "December 2002 Report - Fatal Road Crash Report and Statistics" prepared by officials of the National Department of Transport (NDoT). It has statistics on the number of fatal crashes in December, on the types of vehicles involved, on the day of the week and the time of the day (enabling us to assess what are the most dangerous times), and many other facts.
But behind the statistics it is very important always to remember something else:
"List of names of deceased people:
MV Shabalala (driver)
BC Mdunge (age 43, passenger)
HA Ngcobo (age 8, passenger)
BJ Khulu (age 32, passenger)
BP Nxumalo (age 4 months, passenger)
Seriously injured - 9 passengers"
Or
"23 December 2002, time 9.45
N1 between Worcester and Rawsonville. Clear sky, dry road. 5 vehicles involved. 11 fatalities, including one Landrover Freelander on route from Gauteng to Cape Town for holiday:
Mr R Cloete (driver)
Mrs Cloete (passenger)
Monique Cloete (age 2, passenger)
Andre Beukes (age 4, passenger)"
And so it goes on and on.
In December last year, in the midst of the festive season, 1216 people lost their lives in 975 crashes. It is not entirely clear whether this represents an increase over the previous year, or a slight reduction. The Department had reported 887 fatalities for December 2001, however it seems that there were 388 unreported fatal accidents in that month, which would likely mean a slightly larger number of fatalities in 2001.
But we shouldn't get too fixated on year-to-year comparisons. The basic fact is that every road fatality is a tragedy, and there are too many tragedies on our roads, every single day, every month, every year.
In 1998, the last year for which we have comprehensive statistics, 9086 people were fatally injured on our roads. That's the rough equivalent of nine average schools simply wiped out.
The high number of fatalities this past festive season provoked an important public debate, and this Parliament must respond to the public concern. But how?
There were those who simply blamed government, or the Department of Transport. Others blamed "the public" or particular categories of drivers or vehicles. Minibuses are often assumed, somewhat inaccurately as it happens, to be the main culprits.
As our contribution to this very important national concern, the Transport Portfolio Committee began this year with public hearings on road accidents. We invited the NDoT, the Road Traffic Management Corporation, the SA Bus Owners Association, the SA National Taxi Council, and the Automobile Association.
What are the most important messages to emerge from these hearings?
One: Don't abandon the Arrive Alive Campaign and the wider government Road to Safety strategy
There is always the danger that we in the ANC will simply defend government policies because they ARE government policies, and conversely there is the danger that opposition parties will oppose them for the same reason. I think that it was particularly significant, therefore, that both the AA and SA Bus Owners Association said to us categorically that, whatever the disappointments, we must all resist the temptation of abandoning the Arrive Alive Campaign and the wider government Road To Safety strategy. SABOA, in its input, said to us that for the first time in SA we have a coherent, comprehensive strategy to deal with road safety. They urged us not to throw it all away in desperation and try to invent something new. But they also urged us to ensure (it's a theme that President Mbeki has been taking up in general terms) that there is much more effective implementation of existing policies, legislation and strategies. I will come back to this in a moment.
Two:We must be realistic about the South African reality
South Africa is not alone in facing this terrible scourge. In 2000 over 1,2 million people were killed on roads around the world. In some countries one in every 10 hospital beds is occupied by a victim of a road traffic crash. It is in this context that the World Health Organisation will be dedicating international health day next year, 7th April, to road safety. 90 percent of all traffic casualties occur in low and middle income countries. In our country we have a particularly lethal combination of factors. President Mbeki, in his State of Nation address this year referred to a "dual economy" - a modern, and relatively globally competitive economy on the one hand, and marginalisation and underdevelopment on the other. This dual reality plays itself out dramatically on our roads.
In fact the problem is even more complicated. At the heart of apartheid-era social engineering was, of course, the removal of black people from town and city centres and their displacement to distant, peri-urban townships. Close enough for a long daily commute for the work-force, but far enough for the purposes of coercive control. The design and location of freeways was often quite deliberately part of the strategy of containment, they were designed to act like mediaeval moats, except in reverse, to keep the township dwellers bottled up in times of emergency.
And so we have, still today, an impressive national network of high-speed free-ways, bordering huge sprawling, peri-urban poverty stricken townships and squatter camps.
No wonder that a shocking 40% of all road fatalities in South Africa are pedestrians, and many of them in these localities.
The point I am making is that long-term sustainable solutions to road safety are necessarily linked to the overall effort at pushing back the frontiers of poverty, and to the integrated and human-friendly development of our living spaces.
Three: Public attitudes and Moral Regeneration
According to the Road to Safety Strategy the main contributors to road crashes are:
Addressing road safety means addressing all challenges - whether it be checking the road-worthiness of vehicles, or repairing pot-holes on roads. But it should be obvious from the statistics that the major focus needs to be on drivers and general public attitudes. The key driver factors are:
Changing our road behaviour culture is not the work of a single day or year. Indeed, it is related to the broader struggle for a moral regeneration within our society. All of the broader social moral challenges we face - disrespect for the law, carelessness about lives, our own and those of others, a lack of general responsibility for our actions, disrespect for public spaces - these problems inevitably spill out onto our roads. We have to change, all of us.
What can be done?
We need to keep pressing ahead with powerful Arrive Alive messages. We need to put even more resources into the schools road safety programmes which we have started.
The AA, in their presentation to the Portfolio Committee hearings suggested a particular focus on seat-belts. The law now states that seat-belt wearing is compulsory, not just in the front seats, but also in the rear seats. But how many of us still see children bouncing loose in the back of cars.
There is also the question of the sale of alcohol at service station complexes along our major holiday national routes. Can we not look more carefully at this?
But, above all, as the ANC we are in agreement with many others who are saying that the key factor to getting a change in road behaviour lies in much more effective, much more intense, and much more visible enforcement on our roads. At the moment, enforcement, where it exists, is almost entirely confined to speed-trapping, mostly with cameras. We agree with the AA when it says that, in terms of behavioural change, it is infinitely more important to stop speeding drivers there and then, to engage them directly, and to check on many other matters - seat-belt compliance, road-worthiness, alcohol blood levels, etc. Getting a traffic fine in the post, two months after the event, when you have possibly even forgotten the event, is the least likely way of getting drivers to be more thoughtful. The principal point is to CHANGE behaviour, not to trap drivers.
The recent highly publicised case of a totally unroadworthy bus driven by an unlicensed driver operating on the main national roads of our country from Eastern Cape to Gauteng at the height of the December festive season without being stopped once is instructive. No doubt the bus went through at least some speed traps. Presumably it wasn't speeding. That was all that was being monitored, and so it passed along its way unhindered.
Which brings me to the fourth and final point that we wish to underline:
Four: Implement the Road Traffic Management Corporation Act
Traffic policing is a provincial and local government competency. There are, currently, more than two hundred different traffic policing authorities in our country. There is often little co-ordination between different authorities, and there is no uniform training. The recent trend towards metro police in the major cities has often seen a further reduction of officers actually deployed to road traffic enforcement work - and this applies as much to Cape Town when it was under the DA, as to any other metro. We are dealing with a systemic, institutional issue, not a simple party political question.
To address this systemic problem the National Assembly passed the Road Traffic Management Corporation Act in 1999. Its main intention was to promote a stronger partnership between national, provincial and local spheres of government. The Corporation has a "share-holders"committee - comprising the national Minister of Transport, the 9 relevant provincial MECs, and local government representatives.
For reasons which are not entirely clear to us, progress in getting the RTMC up and running has been exceedingly slow. One surmises that the problem could be that at the provincial or local level there is reluctance to pool resources, or to surrender an exclusive control. If this is the case, then it is exceptionally short-sighted.
Finally, in the middle of last year, and after some minor amendments to the Act, a CEO for the RTMC was appointed. But eight months have passed, and the CEO is alone without any staff. The Share-holders Committee finally met a few weeks ago, and there is now some sense of urgency on the side of the executive. We want to take this opportunity to urge our colleagues in government to move with the greatest sense of purpose and urgency.
Traffic officers cannot cover every inch of our road network. At the end of the day it is down to the behaviour of drivers and pedestrians. But we cannot let it be said that any of us in government, in whatever sphere, did not at least do the maximum possible to halt the carnage on our roads. From the side of the ANC we hope that this debate will help to add weight to this plea.