Pretoria, 25 October 1999
I congratulate AIC worldwide for organizing the "Developing Southern Africa's Roads Infrastructure Conference". I thank you for affording me the opportunity of making some opening remarks. Developing the Roads Infrastructure of the Southern African region is undoubtedly a key pillar for the economic development of the region and the well being of all its people.
The way you have structured your agenda items reflects a keen understanding of and sensitivity to, the crucial economic and social challenges which we face as individual countries and as the greater Southern African region in the context of a globalized world economic environment.
The current world economic environment generally dictates for all of us the nature of the playing field and in many respects the rules of the game.
None of the countries of Southern Africa can go it alone or escape those realities. In the next decade Southern Africa must emerge as a winning region - producing, manufacturing, trading and interacting on the world stage in a way which is beneficial to the region and all its people. That is the common challenge we all face . We in South Africa need to promote the interests of the Southern African region - not as a mini super power of the region - as some on the world stage love to see us - and not as the big brother of the region, but as an equal participant with all the countries of the region whose coming together is based on common experiences as countries which suffered colonial domination, also our common desire to deal with our colonial and apartheid legacy, our common vision that as Africans - part of the continent of Africa, we seek to build our region and our countries on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and mutual respect. In the words of our President Thabo Mbeki, the new millennium must be Africa's millennium, witnessing the renaissance of our continent.
We have the exciting opportunity of participating in the renewal of our continent, the building of our region, shaping new relationships with and within our region and the world and generally contributing to create a better life for the peoples of our region.
Participation in this renewal process is not the exclusive preserve or responsibility of government or state organs. It calls for a partnership working for the common good - not only between the public and private sectors as traditionally defined (which is government and the private business sector) but one which involves also labour, civil society and more generally those sectors previously excluded or marginalised.
In the context of a many sided transformation vision, economic activity and development play a crucial role. We must produce wealth and transform wealth into more wealth, because without this, there will be no wealth to underwrite social transformation programmes. Developing an adequate infrastructure, including transport infrastructure, is the foundation of economic development.
Concentrating as this conference will on developing Southern Africa's Road Infrastructure, I ask that we view what needs to be done as part of the broader transformation agenda and to help Moving Southern Africa's Roads Infrastructure into the new millennium.
I want you to know that government is fully committed to working with all stakeholders on the basis of a mutually beneficial partnership to develop South Africa's infrastructure at all levels, including transport infrastructure. Over the past 5 years government has, together with our partners in the SADC spent considerable time and energy on planning how we get from where we are to where we want to be. We had to take into account and still have to take into account - the distortions of our inherited legacy, massive social and economic imbalances and inequalities.
We are only too painfully aware of the fact that colonialism devastated our continent and carved it up into spheres of influence, from which Africa has yet to fully recover. Failed experiments in social and economic engineering, dictatorships, war, poverty and famine have been Africa's lot in its recent past.
Economies were left drained by over reliance on bulk commodity exports, social challenges of poverty and more recently the HIV aids pandemic have taxed the sub-continent's resources to the limit.
Our legacy includes stunted and skewed growth, inadequate resources, low levels of human capacity as well as weak, inappropriate and deteriorating infrastructure.
But there is a good reason for optimism. Most African countries have abandoned single-party political systems; dictatorships, (including apartheid dictatorship) have been replaced by democratic systems, economies are being opened up and generally there is a wind of change sweeping the continent. In the wake of this wind of change, there is a recognition that we as stakeholders at all levels - must take each other's hand and walk the road to reconstruction and development together.
The doomsayers amongst us will tell us that we have taken on the impossible. But for the majority of us, particularly those who have strived and participated in the South African miracle, these hard realities represent a challenge no more insurmountable than what we faced in taking on the might of the apartheid order.
The experience of the past five years have taught us about the realism of our dreams. Particularly here in South Africa, we have been able to disentangle ourselves from many of the legacies of the past. We have been able to create a constitution which is accepted as one of the most advanced in the world today. We have begun to effectively wrest the organs of state out of the hands of forces opposed to progress and democracy. We have successfully transformed our policy into one which is appropriate to our new democracy, focused on the needs of our people and our new industrial strategy.
In his first address to parliament as head of state, President Thabo Mbeki set the tone for the next five years of democracy. He spelt out clearly that we are a human government that has at the center of its concerns the needs and aspirations of ordinary, poor people not just in South Africa, but in the region.
In this same speech the president was also very clear that this government was shifting gears from work focused on planning and transformation to an agenda emphasizing delivery. He described us as a nation at work.
In transport we are uniquely positioned to follow the president's lead. We have fundamentally restructured our institutions, focusing the role of government on its core functions generally of making policy, developing strategies, effecting delivery and putting into place regulation. In transport for example the core delivery functions, such as the management of the national road network is now located in a semi-autonomous agency focused on delivering high quality infrastructure in support of our growth strategy.
In the process we have fundamentally transformed the way in which we plan, finance and manage our road infrastructure. In this area, we have successfully pioneered public/private partnerships, mutually beneficial to government and the private sector.
We have commenced the difficult and complex task of restructuring our transport parastatals.
We have broken the structural legacies of inefficient public transport and laid the basic foundations to take public transport into a new millennium of customer focused service and cost.
And now, for the first time, we have an integrated strategy for transport aimed at delivering against customer needs in a fashion which supports and promotes our national economic and social development goals.
Moving South Africa has created the new road map by which we as a nation will be steering our way towards delivering a national and regional strategic transport infrastructure network aimed at providing the basic integration, access and mobility our regional development programme demands.
The Acting Director General of my department will present you a detailed insight into some of our action plans.
I would like to focus on some of the higher level issues and challenges we face in the regional context, including South Africa.
The first is the legacy network with which we sit as a region. So much of Southern Africa's transport network, both in road and rail, follows the alignments and technical specifications of our colonial history. The transport maps of Africa show clearly the legacies of how Africa was carved up between the European colonial powers, - whether it is the transport disjunctures between the former colonies of Britain, Portugal or France, or the different guages of rail implemented by British Imperial or German metric standards.
Within organisations like SADC and COMESA, our subcontinent is grasping the nettle as it systematically works towards an integrated transport network. We have seen the early steps of this, whether it is the coast-to-coast corridor from Walvis Bay to Maputo via Gauteng, or the new rail service between Gauteng to Uganda.
Inherent to our new path of breaking through the transport bottlenecks between our nations, is the hard realities of resource constraints and effective governance mechanisms.
Within the SADC, through the instruments of the transport protocol and the Southern African Transport Co-ordinating Committee (SATCC), we have been focusing on developing the capacity of our member states to implement effective and sustainable funding programmes, governance structures and regulations for transport infrastructure and operations.
Harmonizing systems and laws and removing existing bottlenecks and delays especially at border posts are receiving priority attention.
In our regional spatial development initiatives and bilateral programmes, we have increasingly moved towards engaging the private sector in a more direct role in the financing, construction, management and maintenance of the new strategic infrastructure network.
Here the experience of projects like the Maputo and Trans Kgalagadi corridors have provided invaluable lessons of developing bilateral and multilateral programmes on a public/private sector partnership basis.
Like South Africa, the region is increasingly focusing on user charges and private sector finance as a means to ensuring that our economic infrastructure is delivered on a sustainable basis.
In adopting this approach, we have to be mindful that neither user-charges nor private sector finance come without their problems and challenges.
Africa is impoverished, and even where we provide economic infrastructure, the combination of low affordability levels of ordinary people and the low commercial traffic densities mean that governments cannot wash their hands from financial development.
It is not necessary for me to repeat what we all know, that for most of Africa, nations are heavily indebted. As such, governments cannot be called upon to simply make good on the commercial shortfalls of PPP-developed infrastructure. In short, as we dream of the great African transport network, we dare not build rolls-royce systems which we cannot afford.
We do need to be realistic. It is for this reason that we should be cautious of not finding ourselves down that road where we approach transport infrastructure in a fragmented fashion. Africa at this stage can simply not afford an explosion in transport infrastructure development which delivers a network too wide and too advanced for our resources to sustain.
We are required therefore to take an integrated and system-wide approach to our programme. We have to learn even from the developed world which today is finding itself in difficulty in maintaining its extensive diverse and often duplicating networks.
Intermodalism has a critical role to play in assisting us to reach the optimum allocation and utilisation of resources at a system-level. Infrastructure programmes must be evaluated on the basis of relative optimisation between modes of transport. Government's infrastructure funding strategies must be able to differentiate between appropriate modes for the given and future transport economics of a transport corridor.
I am not suggesting a new form of central gosplan for the SADC transport network. Competition and custer-choice are basic requirements for extracting transport efficiencies out of the transport system.
But I am suggesting, as we have said in Moving South Africa, that we must define the areas of focus for investment, and set the playing fields in a way which ensures that modal optimisation does emerge in our transport system.
We cannot afford to go down that road where, because we have limited resources, we avoid choice in the scope of our road and rail networks, and instead spread our resources thinly. This results in us having an unstrategic system of low quality which will be pounded into oblivion within a very short space of time. Then we will face the long-term costs of having to re-build systems from scratch again.
To summarize this point, Africa is moving forward in a fashion which understands our need to focus resources, manage resources and delivery in a co- ordinated and integrated fashion which optimises resource utilisation. It means that over the next few years our programme of regional integration will emerge, built on a firm foundation of a focused, strategic transport network which is sustainable and well managed.
For the private sector, this represents massive opportunity to get involved, to invest and to profit. The whole of SADC is resolved on implementing a common programme of regulatory reform which ensure that governance and administration is clean, consistent and effective.
May I add that whilst I have concentrated my attention in this address on the bigger picture, government is also putting together an integrated rural development programme. In terms of this programme, rural infrastructure including rural roads feature prominently. Therefore as we focus on the bigger regional picture, development in all local areas in all provinces is also receiving attention.
Again we need a total partnership of all stakeholders to transform the rural landscape in our country.
Finally I want to make it very clear that weak law compliance and poor law enforcement on our roads is a matter which is receiving the highest priority attention on my part. The current disrespect for law and disregarding road safety measures will come to an end.
For South Africa, the growth of our own economy depends on the success of our regional efforts. We are not exempt from the challenges facing the region as many would like to believe. Our own programmes of infrastructure delivery and sustainability are constrained by fiscal realities, limited human capacity, and frankly, an all too often vested interest approach from various stakeholders.
I have been impressed by the extent to which some of the barriers between some of the transport role players have been coming down over the last five years, but I am of the view that we do not yet have the team transport which we need to ensure the delivery against our vision. We must do more.
In the Moving South Africa - action agenda we indicated as government our intention to establish the "partnership for Moving South Africa" as the mechanism to pull our industry together to steer our way forward in implementing the Moving South Africa vision. It is my intention to move forward with this process, and it is my intention to ensure an effective linkage between this partnership and the various SADC processes such that our own national strategy meshes effectively with our common SADC programme.
I have no doubt that this conference can make a big contribution to illuminating the way forward.
I wish the conference success.
Thank you.