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The Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomes the confirmation given by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, during today’s briefing on the controversial Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), that the list of the 33 SANRAL sub-contractors involved with the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) consortium will soon be disclosed.

The DA has been calling for such disclosure for months.

I will be submitting parliamentary questions to the Minister of Transport, S’bu Ndebele, to ascertain exactly when this list will be made public and whether the names and details of all 33 sub-contractors will be revealed without any pre-publication sanitisation.

As soon as the list becomes available, we will be scrutinising all the sub-contractors involved with a view to ruling out the possibility that some of these companies may have inappropriate linkages to government or ANC loyalists. We want to be sure that there was no corrupt activity relating to the sub-contracts and that the public received value for money. We will also be interrogating each contract to ensure that proper tender processes were followed.

We also note that the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL) CEO Nazir Alli has withdrawn his resignation and will be staying on to see through the GFIP. We hope that Mr Alli and Minister Ndebele will now take up the opportunity to appear before the Transport Portfolio Committee, as the DA has requested, and brief it on the issues and concerns around the project.

Today’s announcements are small steps in the right direction. The onus is now on the Inter-ministerial Committee to follow through on this rather late drive for more transparency surrounding the GFIP project.