CSIR Conference Centre, Pretoria, 27 - 28 September 1999
Minister Netelenbos;
Distinguished members of the Netherlands delegation;
My honored colleagues, the Ministers of Transport of the Provinces;
Senior officials of the various Departments of Transport and Traffic of the
three spheres of Government;
Delegates of private sector organisations;
I would like to extend a hearty welcome, firstly, to the Netherlands delegation to South Africa and, secondly, to all the South African delegates who have made time to participate in this workshop on the management and promotion of road traffic safety in our country.
The purpose of our Netherlands guests' visit is to intensify the warm and constructive relationships which already exist between our two countries in the transport sector. The three main topics that will be debated during their visit will be:
Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the scale of the problems we face in this area. Road traffic fatalities in South Africa peaked in 1991 when 444 541 crashes resulted in the deaths of approximately 1 000 people. But in the years that followed, up until the Government of National Unity took office in 1994, crash and fatality levels showed no significant tendency to decline.
As a result, the new government collectively identified reduction in the number of road traffic crashes as one of its top priority projects. At Ministerial level, when my predecessor and his Department completed the White Paper on National Transport Policy in September 1996, a full chapter was dedicated to road traffic management and safety issues.
One of the key building blocks for this chapter in the White Paper was a Road Traffic Quality and Safety Symposium, held in July 1996 in order to develop a Road Traffic Management Strategy in support of broad national transport policy goals.
This Strategy is an ambitious document, covering all related aspects within the field of road traffic management. From the outset it was realised that, in order to ensure its full and effective implementation, various special measures would have to be taken and a whole new range of coordination and delivery structures put in place.
The main functional areas covered by the Strategy, most of which will be deliberated on during this Workshop, include:
The complex tasks of coordination, development and restructuring implicit in this list will be familiar to the many expert practitioners gathered here today. But, faced with the urgent need to start making an immediate impact on the horrendous death-rate o n our roads, government made the decision to concentrate all available resources into a short term implementation plan for road safety, which would focus on high-profile enforcement, the deployment of modern law-enforcement technology and equipment, inter -provincial cooperation in tactical planning and an intensive media communication and PR drive.
This implementation plan, later re-named Arrive Alive, was launched on 1st October 1997, setting itself the target of reducing road death fatalities by at least 5% year-on-year.
The Arrive Alive Campaign targets critical offences resulting in crashes and fatalities namely: speeding; driving under the influence of alcohol; wearing of seat belts and fatigue Now entering its fourth phase, Arrive Alive has clearly succeeded in delivering on the important, if limited, set of objectives it set for itself. The total number of road deaths came down from 9 691 in 1997 to 9 068 in 1998.
This represents a reduction in the death-rate of 6,43%, or - to put it more concretely - a saving of 623 lives nationwide. It also represents a saving to the country of approximately R475,3 million in the knock-on costs of crashes involving casualties. Serious injuries went down by 7,78% - from 39 302 in 1997 to 36 246 in 1998 - while slight injuries were also reduced by 8,07% over the same period.
At the same time, research on the effectiveness of the communication campaign indicated that significant gains in road-user awareness had been achieved, particularly in relation to drinking and driving and the use of seat-belts.
It should be particularly noted, however, that both this research and the prosecution statistics accumulated over the first three phases of Arrive Alive point towards a stubborn resistance on the part of South African drivers to heeding the message that SPEED KILLS. Our drivers are still refusing to take this message seriously, and we are all still continuing to pay a high price for this refusal. In response to these findings, the issue of speeding has been pushed to the top of the communication agenda in phase 4 of the campaign and enforcement of speed limits is being consciously targeted on particular stretches of road, "red spots" and times of day which have been pinpointed by our data analysis as contributing most significantly to crashes.
However, while the Arrive Alive campaign has become a permanent, year-long feature of South African life, we never saw it as a stand-alone solution to the deeper, more systemic problems facing road traffic management in our country. In order, therefore, to give greater long term focus and muscle to the original Road Traffic Management Strategy, preparatory development work was started on two further projects of potentially great importance during 1998 - firstly, an Administrative Adjudication system for road traffic offences and, secondly, the creation of a single, over-arching Road Traffic Management Corporation which would take on dedicated responsibility for all aspects of road traffic management within the institutional and line functional context of the responsibilities assigned to the various spheres of government in our Constitution.
The Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (AARTO) Act was approved by parliament in September 1998.
The main aims of this Act are to:
An Infringement Agency, governed by a Board will be established early in the year 2000 when this Act will enter into force on an incremental basis.
The second major project, the creation of the Road Traffic Management Corporation (or RTMC), took a great step towards fruition in April this year, when Parliament approved its founding Act. This milestone was achieved after a prolonged period of intensive preparatory work carried out by a dedicated national and provincial team and after lengthy, in-depth discussions between all spheres of government.
This RTMC, which will be governed by myself, my provincial ministerial colleagues and two representatives of local government, will accept full responsibility for effective implementation of all the resolutions spelled out in the Road Traffic Management Strategy of 1997.
This strategy will of course not be news to a number of our friends from the Netherlands. The team responsible for developing the draft proposals for the strategy visited the Netherlands to consult, obtain information and documentation which assisted them enormously in their task. I would like to make use of the opportunity to thank the Netherlands delegation for receiving them, supporting them and attending to their needs so thoroughly and conscientiously. They helped us greatly in thinking our way forward from broad strategy to the concrete institutional forms required for implementation.
So how do we see the RTMC as functioning? The major aim of the Corporation will be to ensure effective power-sharing between the three spheres of government and the elimination of fragmented responsibilities for traffic management. It will seek to achieve this aim by:
Our implementation teams are already hard at work shaping the structures and putting in place the arrangements that need to be completed prior to the establishment of the Corporation early next year. On the wider regional front, I would also like to our visitors from the Netherlands to be aware - if they are not already - that South Africa, as a member of the Southern Africa Development Community, was a key participant in the development of the Protocol on Transport, Communications and Meteorology which was signed by the SADC Heads of State in August 1996.
I am pleased to say that the South African Road Traffic Strategy is entirely in harmony with this Protocol, which contains a specific chapter of dedicated to road traffic and aimed at harmonising road traffic management procedures throughout the Southern African Region. We continue, as a country, to participate actively in the development of annexures in support of the Protocol implementation process.
If you will allow me, I will take a minute or two to note a few of the more significant projects currently unfolding in the regional context.
In the light of all the developmental work I have touched on, it seems very clear to me that this Workshop could not be taking place at a more opportune time.
What do we want to achieve together? Here are some brief thoughts. Let us share our experiences, learn the lessons of our mistakes and pinpoint those key areas where our realities overlap sufficiently to enable us to develop common approaches and solutions to problems.
More concretely, from our own point of view as an emergent economy with a critical role to play in regional road traffic safety systems development, let us try to make a priority of identifying possible areas of cooperation around the establishment of a technology-transfer and capacity-building programme between South Africa and the Netherlands.
This will help us enormously as we set up and fine-tune the institutions I have been describing, and it will give us a greater ability to share our own developing expertise with our neighbours as part of a very real contribution to the idea of an African Renaissance.
As a first step, the more this workshop contributes to helping us foresee and overcome in advance the problems which the RTMC will inevitably encounter as it establishes itself, the more we will all be able to say, five years down the line, "That was a workshop that really got us moving."
In conclusion, let me thank the CSIR for undertaking to record the proceedings of the workshop and prepare a concluding document which will clearly map out the way forward. May I wish you every success in your deliberations; and let me say that I am looking forward with the keenest anticipation to receiving the recommendations which will ultimately emerge from the work you are about to begin.
It now gives me great pleasure to hand over to Ms Tineke Netelenbos, Minister of Transport, Public Works and Water Management of the Netherlands.
Thank you.