George, Tuesday 24th October 2000
Mr mayor,
Councillor Notshokovu,
Ladies and gentlemen
Thank you for the invitation to conduct the official opening of the 37th biennial conference of the institute of municipal police officers of Southern Africa at such a beautiful venue.
I am pleased to be with you here today, not least because your organisation is one whose vision goes beyond the borders of our own country, South Africa, and incorporates the perspectives and experience of fellow officers from our neighbouring countries in the sadc region. To our guests from across our borders - let me wish you a very warm welcome to South Africa. I trust that your conference will be productive and successful, and that, while you debate the many difficult issues facing all of us, you will also find time to relax and enjoy both the conference facilities and the natural beauty of our south eastern coastal region.
There is no disguising the fact that we face some daunting tasks. As all our South African colleagues will know, the road network in this country claimed some 9 200 lives in 1998 - the most recent year for which we have final verified statistics. This was at a cost to the national economy of approximately 13 billion Rand. And I don't need to emphasise that all this was at the human cost of untold suffering and trauma to the dead, the injured and the bereaved. I do not have the statistics to hand for our neighbouring countries, but I'm sure that our colleagues will tell us that they have to deal with equally grim realities.
I'm sure, then, that our colleagues from north of our borders will forgive me if I dwell in some detail on South African experiences, and the initiatives we are taking here to try to deliver meaningful changes to the conditions we have inherited. We are well aware of the differences prevailing in our sister countries in the sadc region, but I will take the risk of proceeding from the wise words of that great african statesman amilcar cabral, who taught us the abc of honesty when he said, "tell no lies, claim no easy victories" and gave us the simple truth that "you cannot cook the rice outside of the pot." These are the messages that we are all here to share. We are all in the same historical pot, and we need to be clear about what's cooking in it.
In other words, while we come from different countries, we all know each other's stories. Then, beyond that, we are what we are professionally. As municipal traffic officers operating at the hard edge of crime and undisciplined road behaviour, and continuously faced with emergency situations, you know all about the difficulties of trying to carry out your professional duties under the stress of budgetary constraints which often lead to critical shortages of personnel, equipment and skills. There is an urgent need to address these issues, and I want to take this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you today. Let us speak frankly and to the point, starting out from our South African realities.
We should begin with a hardheaded look at the balance sheet. We have some very significant positive achievements to our credit, and it is important not to lose sight of these as we also - and very necessarily - confront the negatives.
As I have said before on a number of occasions, how you react to a set of problems determines your chances of success in overcoming them. Either you see them as insurmountable obstacles or you see them as challenges that can bring out the best in all of us.
You look at a glass of water - if you see it as half empty, you start feeling negative and miserable and you sit around waiting for the worst. If you see it as half full, you think "with a bit more of a push we can get this thing full to the brim."
what have we got going for us? first of all, through the arrive alive framework we have spent three hard years working out how to share resources better, coordinate our energies more effectively, focus enforcement on critical offences, use available technology better and communicate more effectively. And we have started to see results. Even though the first couple of years of arrive alive concentrated mainly on the peak holiday seasons, we have already begun to see the signs of a steady drop of between 6 and 9% in road fatalities over the first three phases of the campaign.
This is very important. This is real. For the first time in ten years we showed that we were able to start turning round what had seemed to be an unstoppable upward trend. You should all pause for a moment, pat yourselves on the back and say, "we can do it. We can make a difference."
But then we must all immediately think further and ask "what are the key things we need to maintain this momentum, and maintain it actively through our own individual commitment?" while we ask, "how can we mobilise additional resources?" we must also ask, "are we really making the best use we can of the resources we have? how can we work better and smarter?"
you should all be aware that the arrive alive business plan 2000-2004 concentrates in a much more comprehensive way than previously on year-round enforcement and communication actions based on provincial and local business plans which show how each authority will meet the quantified targets set for a wide range of activities.
These activities include:
The measures we are taking also include:
All this shows that arrive alive has moved to a new level of maturity. This is a seriously challenging agenda, and we are already in it. All provincial and local authorities have pledged themselves to deliver measurable outcomes within this framework, and there is no going back. How well they are able to deliver then becomes the absolutely critical question. This brings us face to face with the issues of institutional structures and resources.
Let's start with the institutional structures: firstly, aarto, or, to give it its full title, the administrative adjudication of road traffic offences act. I am pleased to be able to tell you today that aarto is coming - and coming soon. The necessary funds for its incremental implementation, starting in gauteng, have been made available, and I expect this first installation to be up and running by april next year.
Rollout to the other provinces will take place over the following two years. We all know what a transformation this will start to make towards dramatically increasing the payment rate on fines for traffic offences and unclogging our courts of routine traffic matters.
We will at last be able to have standardised penalties for the most common offences. We will have an effective collection system backed up by the power to attach fine defaulters' property.
And we will create space in the judicial system for the establishment of increasing numbers of dedicated and mobile traffic courts to try the more serious offences quickly and efficiently.
We are already in discussion with the ndpp and the ministry of justice on this issue, and on the development of a sustained programme of information and education for magistrates and prosecutors with a view to achieving much more regular imposition of maximum sentences for the serious road offences that daily give rise to the carnage on our roads.
This is a beginning. we will need patience through the rollout process, and we will not be able, constitutionally, to implement the other key element of aarto, the points demerit system, until the infringement agency is operational in all nine provinces. But we are on our way.
Secondly, let me turn to the road traffic management corporation. Again, here, funds have been cleared for the appointment of a ceo, the establishment of a head office and the preparatory work that needs to go into setting up the corporation's systems and staffing structures.
As you know, the rtmc act says that the pooling of resources envisaged as the basis for the rtmc's operation is voluntary. This means what it says. the rtmc will not suddenly take everything over - and no traffic authority, whether provincial or local, will be forced into it.
MINCOM has decided that the functional areas of the rtmc that must first be mobilised are:
But, as I have already pointed out, all of these are already seen as urgent issues that cannot be left on the back burner while the rtmc consolidates itself.
As we know, the first four areas are already explicit components of the arrive alive agenda.
And I can tell you that they also feature very strongly in the action plan developed out of strategy 2000-2004: an end to carnage on South Africa's roads, whose main thrusts were formally approved by mincom last friday. In a moment, I will make some further comments on the impact we expect the strategy to have, by way of concluding my remarks to you today.
But for now I want to say that we should be doing some hard creative thinking about how to gear ourselves up as municipal forces to meet the challenges which are already upon us, and which are not going to be magically overcome by the arrival of either AARTO or the RTMC.
I hope you will agree with me when I say that the problems you face can be broadly summarised under the headings of staffing shortage, professional recognition and service conditions, transformation and corruption.
If I say a few very brief words about each of these, I do so not with a view to providing easy solutions, but perhaps to give you a sense of national government's provisional thinking on these matters and to open up points for further debate.
Firstly, staffing: it is very clear, and I think almost everyone agrees, that staff numbers have fallen to critically low levels, putting great strain on your profession and creating a very strong public perception that policing on the roads is almost invisible and that the chances of getting caught are low enough to make irresponsible and criminal road behaviour an acceptable risk. I think this is an unfair perception, but it is still undoubtedly true that it is too easy to get away with murder on our roads. I therefore want to send a strong signal from this gathering today that national government's view is that everything possible must be done within both provincial and local authority budgets to see that as many as possible of the currently vacant traffic officer posts are filled as a matter of urgency.
As a first step, additional administrative staff should be brought on board to free up trained officers from the desk-bound tasks that keep them away from where they should be - out on the roads, monitoring and enforcing.
Secondly, management should be doing everything possible to ensure that officers are deployed at the right places and at the right times to make an impact in reducing critical traffic offences and saving lives.
Thirdly, officers' work should be subject to clear performance criteria that are not just about income generation through fines. additional training and promotion should be dependent on regular performance assessments based on quality of work.
Fourthly, if management and officers want to argue for increased budgetary allocation to fill all existing vacancies and further increase staffing levels, they must seriously tackle the challenge of presenting a clear cost-benefit case for how such spending will pay for itself in the medium to long term, in terms of reduced knock-on costs throughout the system. it can be done. We ourselves are busy with just such an exercise at national level.
I come now to the issue of professional recognition and service conditions. You will all know that for some time now there has been a good deal of thinking aloud about alternative possibilities for the structure of policing in South Africa. is it better to continue with many autonomous and fragmented traffic police services, with different jurisdictions, powers and responsibilities, and with functions that confusingly overlap those of the saps? or might it be worth thinking about moving towards an integrated national police service that should, in theory, be better able to concentrate all available resources on different aspects of the same basic task - fighting crime and supporting our communities?
You might think that the second option would give traffic officers enhanced professional recognition, a better career structure, higher pay and general access to greater resources. But you might equally feel that the first option is better: that your specialist knowledge, skills and ways of relating to the community might be submerged and lost in an umbrella national police service; that you might be pulled into areas of policing that, as traffic officers, you never signed up for in the first place; or that your skills would in any case be undervalued in the established police culture.
I don't know the answers to these questions. But I want to tell you that I am open-minded about the issue, and will listen carefully to whatever consensus you may be able to develop around it.
What I will say, though, is that if you take the first view and opt for maintaining the current arrangements, then you will need to urgently face up to the questions of how to overcome the fragmentation that exists, how to develop your own professionalism and how to fight for your budgets and your institutional space as a highly skilled, deservedly respected specialist force. The RTMC may well provide a significant part of the answer to this question, but it cannot take away the responsibility for how we face up to it in the interim, how we shape the culture of the new institution and how we build first-rate services in the gaps which voluntary unification will inevitably leave open.
This then leads me on to a couple of even briefer comments about the last two issues: transformation and corruption. As you seek to deepen your professionalism you will, I'm sure, be asking yourselves "are we, as rank and file traffic officers and as management, fully on board with the basic values of our southern african region and the new South Africa? Is this reflected in how we relate to one another as colleagues, in how we address our differences, our training requirements and our promotion opportunities?
Are we transformed - or at least, seriously engaged in transforming ourselves?"
I ask this question very seriously, not just for the sake of form. I am focussing on values and respect here, fundamental questions about what makes an organisation work or not work.
I'm not talking about settling old scores, or crude head counts on the basis of skin colour, but about the space that we are creating for the release of talents and creative energies. And about talking to each other, without fear or favour.
These are difficult questions, especially for South Africa, but there is no other way forward.
It's not a matter of choice any more. we are not going back to the past, so we have to make the present and the future work. That means coming out from behind whatever barricades may still be operating in our minds, recognising demographic realities, recognising training and mentorship needs, but also recognising existing skills and commitments - and finding a productive mix between them. Above all, it means having the guts to talk to each other, to look at where we come from historically. If we aren't honest about where we come from, we can forget about making our country a better place.
In South Africa, this means abandoning the defence of long-standing educational and cultural privileges, and giving up whispering about the supposed failures of the new dispensation. But it also means not wanting to overthrow everything that can be stereotyped as belonging to the past on the simple basis of skin colour. Let me be clear. Our task now is to serve the broad majority of our people who were oppressed and marginalized by apartheid - and before that, in our wider region - by colonialism.
It is to reverse historical wrongs that are written into the geography of where we live, how we go to work, what forms of transport are available to us, and whether we have work at all. But we can't just change places, change life-styles, change class. We now have to prove ourselves by our commitment - by what we can deliver in making our countries and our communities places that we are proud to represent.
In this context, I will say one short word about corruption. cynicism and greed teach us that we can make excuses - either about how we were oppressed previously or how we are being marginalized now. If we buy into this, we say "ok, it's my turn now; I'm going to get what I want out of the system." There is only one outcome from this approach - disaster for all.
I am saying today that no such excuses are acceptable. I am saying that it is the duty of all of us present here today to fight against the easy speeches that justify corruption with all the strength that we have. there can be no compromises on this point.
In conclusion, let me turn once more to practical issues, to the bricks and mortar of our way forward. A few moments ago I mentioned strategy 2000-2004. I consider this a crucially important initiative. I expect to launch the final document setting out what we want the strategy to deliver towards the end of november this year. It will directly address what we see as the key underlying system problems in road traffic quality and law compliance in this country. I can only give you a flavour of it now, but I will briefly touch on five of its main action areas. these deal with the following crucial issues:
- formalise and regulate driving schools and instructors;
- tighten up registration criteria for driving licence examiners, tied to annual refresher courses and regular monitoring and inspection of their throughput;
- introduce a computerised learner's licence test system with multilingual, audio-visual, touch-screen features, random generation of test questions and automated marking and licence printing. this system will be a huge step forward in user-friendliness will minimise opportunities for fraudulent human intervention;
- revise the k-53 driving test to make it less abstract, more practically focussed and better supported by learning material; and finally,
- tighten up skills testing and medical fitness standards for professional drivers, linked to a compulsory operator code of practice dealing with fleet safety management and driver hours and working conditions.
5. the fifth and final issue is this: ensuring that we systematically remove unfit and unsafe vehicles from our roads through a combination of enforcement, regulation and incentives. on the one hand, inspectorate and vehicle testing station reform backed up by regular monitoring blitzes, ruthless prosecution and the phased introduction on annual roadworthiness testing for all vehicles.
On the other hand, recapitalisation of the minibus taxi industry and compulsory implementation of proven vehicle safety technologies like top speed limiters and anti-blow-out tyre devices for heavy freight and public passenger transport vehicles, backed up by incentives from insurance companies in the form of reduced premiums.
There are many other issues contained in strategy 2000-2004. but I think I have said enough now. We know how high the stakes are. and we know that there are no quick fixes.
Fundamentally transforming our road cultures is a critical element in building responsible citizenship and rediscovering the simple truths of care and concern for one another. These tasks are not glamorous or headline grabbing, but they are worthy of our total commitment.
Let us hope that we will prove equal to them.
In this spirit, I wish you all the best for your deliberations during the course of this important conference.
I thank you.