Vienna, Austria, 28th September 2001
"South Africa is open for business - a stable, secure and democratic partner in trade, communications & transport development"
Chairperson and distinguished colleagues
Rail strategy is an integral component of wider transport strategy; and a country or region's transport strategy is shaped and driven by its history. Since you may not all be fully aware of how we in South Africa approach these matters, let me begin by very briefly explaining to you how our recent history, and the experience we have accumulated after seven short years of democracy, informs our approach to both developmental policy and transport strategy.
While it would be foolish not to recognise the new political dangers, economic uncertainties and moral dilemmas of the historic moment that is unfolding in the wake of the World Trade Centre atrocity, I want to say that I come here today to express a strong sense of local and regional optimism. I do so advisedly. We in South Africa have never lived our "miracle" of transition as a miracle, but rather as a cautious and pragmatic exercise in negotiation and compromise. We are acutely conscious of the dangers involved in negotiating the rapids of change and adjustment, both local and global. We take nothing for granted. So what I am about to say to you comes tempered by hard experience. It is simply this: we are confident and excited about the strength of the platform we have built over the past seven years - both for our own future development and for effective cooperation with the countries of our region and the rest of the world. The message I bring you is that South Africa is open for business and ready for extended partnerships - not only in the transport sphere but on many other fronts.
After the dark years when the apartheid system was in collapse, we finally achieved democracy in April 1994. Many of you will still carry with you the image of long lines of voters standing peacefully and patiently in the hot sun to register their first-ever free vote for a government of their choice. Despite the tensions and localised violence that had preceded that election, the widely predicted bloodbath did not take place. Since then, in two further rounds of municipal elections and in a second general election in 1999, our people have demonstrated both their maturity as citizens and the stability of our new democratic institutions.
The first five years of governance were all about policy formulation and the entrenchment of the crucial constitutional building blocks of our new society - the new Constitution itself, the Bill of Rights and the important cluster of independent watchdog institutions that were created as a counterbalance to the power of the executive. We legislated on every front to roll back the legacy of apartheid. We restructured and slimmed down unwieldy central government structures.
In the case of Transport, for instance, my Department has scaled down its staff component from over 1000 employees in 1996 to around 250 today, and has created four new arms length regulatory Agencies: the South African National Roads Agency, the South African Maritime Safety Authority, the South African Civil Aviation Authority and the Cross-Border Road Transport Agency (CBRTA).
We gave practical effect to the principle of cooperative governance by devolving substantial powers to the provincial and municipal spheres; and finally, we exercised tight fiscal prudence and succeeded in dramatically reducing the accumulated international debt of the late apartheid years. We have a sophisticated financial and services sector and - as the World Bank, the WTO and the ratings agencies have repeatedly recognised - we have handled the transition to an open economy with considerable success.
Becoming more competitive in key traditional sectors like wine, fruit and textile production inevitably led to initial job losses and strained industrial relations. But at the same time we have succeeded in creating a number of new, technology-based enterprises and have achieved an overall net gain in jobs while maintaining sound macro-economic fundamentals.
Getting all these elements in place and keeping them in equilibrium was - and continues to be - a delicate process. It involves root-and-branch institutional transformation. It requires developing new capabilities and creating new structures that take time to settle down. Workers and the poor - this government's core constituency - have been the very ones who have had to endure most of the pain of the restructuring process. In a context of heightened expectation of rapid economic growth and redistribution, we have had to introduce a set of new and difficult arguments about sustainable growth, sustainable job creation, sustainable empowerment. And we have had to manage the fall-out, addressing not only business and our own core support-base but also those sections of our society who found it difficult to imagine that we could govern successfully at all.
The degree of success we have achieved, in the tough environment of global competition and international investor perceptions of emerging market instability, can be measured by the almost complete disappearance of political violence, the steady downward trend in industrial action the fact that we have been able to declare the second term of government as a phase characterised both by further opening to world markets and focussed service delivery to the most disadvantaged sectors of our society. The key delivery areas are basic services such as housing, electricity, water and sanitation, backed by investment in health, education, communication technology and transport infrastructure.
We asked for the patience and understanding of our people because we knew very well that unwinding the legacy of apartheid and creating substantive equity in our society would be the work of decades, not of a few months or years. We still face serious social and economic problems: poverty, unemployment, rural migration, gross spatial distortions written onto the face of our cities, vast disparities of income, education and quality of life.
Years of sanctions-busting and institutional criminality in government and years of deprivation, anger and frustration on the side of the disinherited and marginalised have left us with a problem of crime that we have to wrestle with every day.
But, slowly and steadily, we are winning all the important battles. And we are consolidating a stable and peaceful society. Only a month ago, South Africa hosted the UN-sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban. As you all know, this was an event fraught with contention and shadowed by the political tensions of the Middle East. Thousands of delegates, representatives of NGOs, pressure groups and protesters descended on Durban. There were large-scale demonstrations every day of the Conference and many heated exchanges. Yet there was not a single stone thrown, not a single window broken and not a single demonstrator's head was cracked by a police baton. We ran a tight ship in terms of conference security and logistics, but at the same time we opened up a free space for democratic argument and protest. The people on the streets responded accordingly.
So let me emphasise again: we are open for business; we are open for investment; we are open for long-term cooperation. We are leaders in our region and in Africa, and we are the gateway to access to sub-Saharan markets. We take our regional leadership and peace-making roles very seriously, and we are determined to play a patient but decisive role in bringing stability to the Great Lakes and wider South Central African zone.
We invite you to partner with us, and nowhere more so than in the transport sector. We have an excellent national road network serving key internal and international development corridors. We have a strong rail network supporting bulk commodity and general freight haulage. We have the world-renowned Blue Train supporting high-end tourist adventure in Southern Africa. We have a well-developed commuter rail network in our six main metropolitan areas, and we want to see this significantly expanded over the coming years. We have the Orex and Coallink bulk freight lines, the latter linked to the world-class coal terminal and industrial development zone of Richards Bay; and in Durban we have the busiest container port on the African continent. We have just recently begun development of a major new port and IDZ at Coega in the Eastern Cape province.
Across all of these facilities, we are investing heavily in the streamlining of logistical chains and the development of seamless inter-modal freight movements. We are looking for support in all these areas, and there will be plenty of scope for productive investment in logistics, infrastructure, rolling stock, signalling systems and, eventually, operations. In the ports and rail sectors we are already looking twenty years and more ahead. We are currently working on a multi-modal Transport Funding Strategy that in the short term includes the development of a five-year Transport Infrastructure Investment Programme.
At the same time, we want to find a better balance than currently exists between road and rail. To achieve this we are working out a set of mechanisms to promote a significant strategic shift from road to rail in both the freight and passenger sectors. The shift has three prongs to it.
Firstly, it involves a concerted enforcement effort to eliminate overloading through efficient use of static and mobile weighbridges and the imposition of punitive fines for violations.
Secondly, it involves revisiting current national and regional vehicle axle-weight limits with a view towards a phased weight-limit reduction programme. Thirdly, it involves developing a database that quantifies damage and costs on the road network to provide input to a planning model that will allow us to internalise road-based externalities and recover appropriate costs through licence fees and other user charges.
We are also looking hard at safety and economic regulation issues. I will shortly be submitting new legislation to Parliament to establish a Rail Safety Regulator for South Africa, whose role will be to monitor and manage all areas of rail safety risk, independently from the operators of rail services. A National Commercial Ports Policy has been drafted and will soon be presented to the Minister's Sub-Committee on Restructuring of State Owned Enterprises and to industry stakeholders.
In terms of the Policy, my Department will be responsible for developing the regulatory and landlord functions of a new Ports Authority, while the Department of Public Enterprises will drive forward a restructuring process aimed at achieving internationally competitive levels of productivity and service differentiation in the sphere of operations. Substantial investment opportunities will soon begin to emerge in this sector.
In the wider regional and continental context, our freight and long-distance rail parastatal, Spoornet - which is itself in going through a process of restructuring and re-focussing - is already heavily involved in operations and the provision of logistical services and training in some 14 sub-Saharan corridors. In the global context, through our transport agencies and parastatals, we have become full and active participants in international regulatory bodies such as ICAO, the IMO and PIARC and have played a major role in new policy formulation activities in areas such as international search and rescue agreements and the Yamassoukro Declaration on Open Skies for Africa.
Across the whole range of economic activities, we are now poised to take a big leap forward, in conditions of peace, stability, democracy and respect for human rights. I look forward to sharing thoughts with you, learning important lessons from the experience of our colleagues in both the developed and developing worlds, and getting down to business with all of you.
Thank you for your attention.