GREATER GERMISTON TLC, 12 December 1999
Your Worship the Mayor of Greater Germiston
Colleague Minister Mosunkutu
Distinguished representatives of the Taxi Association
Honoured guests
Friends
I am delighted to be here with all of you today to share in this important event and say a few brief words about the Arrive Alive Campaign. I am also intrigued that you have asked me to do so in the context of the rapidly approaching new Millennium. This set me thinking about issues of road traffic safety and management in some new ways. I don't know how all of you feel about this, but for me bringing a millennial perspective to bear on matters of road safety creates a sensation of strangeness which we can perhaps turn to good use. The shadow of the new millennium is upon us, now only 19 days away. It is not given to many people to see the turn of a new century. Still fewer have the privilege of being present as witnesses to the turn of a millennium. Being here at such a moment inevitably tends to shift our sense of scale and historical perspective, whatever issues we happen to be addressing.
We are sitting on a planet whose population now exceeds 10 billion people. I am given to understand that the last time a new millennium came round - when the year 1000 succeeded the year 999 - the world's total population was less than1 billion. And most of this extraordinary population explosion has taken place over the last two centuries of human history. How do we understand where we are today and what the new millennium will mean for ourselves, our children and grandchildren and the many generations to come?
It is not surprising, when we start thinking in this way about the long term future of the planet - and about how small we all are as individuals in the context of 1000 years of history - that many people become agitated and filled with a sense of fear, doom and dread. Can we all survive? Will the headlong progress of globalised economic production - and the social inequalities and tensions that it drags in its wake - end up by destroying planet earth through a combination of war, environmental degradation or mass starvation?
These are times of prophecy, fantasy and superstition. But it is worth reminding ourselves that many people around the turn of the millennium in the year 1000 saw - or thought they saw - portents, strange beasts, shooting stars, comets and all sorts of other paranormal phenomena. Thousands were convinced that the end of the world was nigh.
Despite all these fears - and despite the most brutal processes of state formation, mercantile conquest, capitalist accumulation, slavery, imperialism, genocide and cold war which followed over the ensuing centuries - and saw millions of human beings suffering and dying before their time - despite all these horrors, the world did indeed survive for another 1000 years.
Will it survive another 1000 years? The answer, as always, lies in human hands. How wise or how foolish will we collectively prove to be in managing the huge forces and powers we have created? Which will prevail? - the technologies of civil society - peace, health, development and communication - or the technologies of greed and social neglect - unbridled competition, oppression, exploitation, starvation, worldwide epidemics and yet more war? We do not know.
Only last week, in the failure of the World Trade Organisation's Summit talks in Seattle, we saw how difficult it is going to be to reconcile the interest of the world's richest nations with those of its poorest nations - the demands of the strong vs. the needs of the weak. These are real, tough global contradictions, which carry within them the seeds of widespread, serious conflicts and disorders.
But what has all this got to do with Arrive Alive? My answer is threefold:
We have steadily been proving the world wrong since the days of Kempton Park. If over the first five years of democratic government we have succeeded in defusing the possibility of civil war, stabilising our society, creating a general climate of peace and making progress, through hard compromises, with the difficult task of reconciliation; if we have ensured continuity of government and economic stability even as we have been grappling with the problems of transformation; if we have done all this, why should we think that any problem is beyond solution?
The problem of the carnage on our roads is one which all developed and developing societies face. It is part of the price we pay as citizens for a form of mobility based on motor vehicles. Like everything else to do with the way this world of ours makes progress, our dependence on the motor vehicle is a two-faced thing. On the one hand, it has taken the task of getting fast from A to B, which - for every century prior to the one we are about to leave, was a major undertaking - and turned it into something we take for granted. On the other hand, we are increasingly paying the price for this convenience in terms of urban congestion and environmental pollution.
Then, as South Africans, the convenience of the motor vehicle comes shadowed with a series of additional problems. Some of these are familiar to many of the developing nations of the world. Others are peculiar to our own history of uneven development, distorted and skewed in very particular ways by apartheid. Put simply, the rich - historically mainly those who were white - reaped the major convenience benefits of the private motor vehicle operating on a sophisticated national road network. The poor - overwhelmingly those who were black and systematically disadvantaged on the basis of their skin colour - were either shut out from this system entirely or made captive to over-stretched public passenger transport modes over whose services, timetables, comfort, appropriateness and safety regulation they had no say whatsoever.
Still, to this very day, as we look at the fatality statistics for the millennium summer holiday season, we see that the majority of the people dying on our roads are passengers in public transport vehicles or pedestrians. In South Africa, apartheid continues to live while death remains discriminatory.
So when we tackle the problem of road safety - and the deeper underlying problems of traffic management systems, economic opportunity and democratic participation in decision-making - we are tackling our history. We've done it before - and we can do it again.
What we must NOT, at all costs, do is run all the problems related to safety on our roads into one big stew, and either throw up our hands in despair or look for scapegoats and villains to compensate ourselves psychologically for our own failure to become part of the solution.
We have repeatedly said that Arrive Alive is a transitional programme. It can contain the problems it addresses, but it needs extra muscle built into it to meet the long term challenges of road safety. Nevertheless, I want to emphasise today that, in terms of the very specific goals it set for itself, Arrive Alive has been a major success story.
The death rate on our roads has declined for three years straight - and each year by more then the target of 5%. This is a fact.
Arrive Alive has taught us very important lessons about coordinating resources and efforts as rationally and effectively as possible across more than 750 traffic authorities. It has helped us to align the enforcement actions of traffic officers, SAPS officers and SANDF personnel, and to use hard statistics to target enforcement actions on those stretches of road and those times of the day or week where we know most crashes take place.
These statistics have shown us, beyond any possibility of argument, what are the key issues that we need to concentrate on: speeding, drinking and driving, failure to wear seatbelts, overloading, vehicle and driver fitness, driver carelessness towards pedestrians and pedestrian carelessness in crossing and walking along our roads. Above all it has focussed us on the crucial role that speed plays in roughly 75% of all crashes and the pervasive - if not always so clearly visible - impact of alcohol and drugs in crashes involving both motor vehicles and pedestrians.
Arrive Alive has made us supremely aware of the necessity for high-visibility, 24 hour targeted enforcement, backed up by effective alignment of the traffic policing and criminal justice systems and the certainty of prosecution for every transgression. We have not yet reached where we want to be, but we are very clear about the road that has to be followed.
I will simply mention the regulation changes we have already begun introducing and the major system level changes which are in the pipeline for next year:
Firstly: the reduction of the speed limit for buses, coaches and minibus taxis from 120 to 100 km per hour (which we WILL enforce, whether some drivers or operators like it or not - because we know that it will save substantial numbers of lives every year). This change is likely to be followed early next year by further regulatory changes touching on issues such as onboard electronic monitoring devices for public passenger vehicles, driver operating hours, reduction of the intervals between renewal tests for the professional driver's permit, a compulsory practical examination at each renewal date, tightened up medical examinations for professional drivers, and a range of other actions still under consideration.
Secondly: the establishment of the Infringement Agency for AARTO, the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences, which will ensure standardised, appropriately tough sentencing levels for road traffic infringements and offences. It will take the vast majority of these cases out of our over-clogged justice system; it will ensure that when you are ticketed you are followed up and you pay, and it will systematically take repeat offenders off our roads by suspending or revoking the right to drive of repeat offenders who have exceeded the demerit points threshold on the new credit card driving licence.
Thirdly: the launch of the Road Traffic Management Corporation (or RTMC) which will, for the first time in our history, 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:
Finally, I want to end this contribution to your event today on a cautiously upbeat note. I feel that we are much closer than we have ever been before to reaching the combined critical mass of system changes, regulatory measures and changes in people's consciousness and culture as road users that will see us beginning to make really serious inroads into the levels of death and economic damage which our country's roads still exact year by year.
A Millennium is a very long time indeed. When we are counting lives and the saving of lives, a year or even a month can seem like a more significant marker. But as we peer over the edge of the last year of our Millennium, I am strengthened and heartened by what I know our people have already proved themselves capable of achieving in the last few decades and the hectic last 5 years we have all lived through - in millennial terms, the wink of an eye.
In thanking you for inviting me here today, let me wish you well for the rest of your programme and leave you with this thought. Let us stay calm and focussed, let us build systematically, let us think creatively and share our knowledge. Above all, let us have faith in ourselves as South Africans. We can and will make the changes that are needed, so that as we tick off each succeeding year of the new millennium, more and more of us will still be around to say to our children and their children: ARRIVE ALIVE.