Pretoria, 10 October 2001
Thank you once again for inviting me to this important annual event, where we all get the opportunity to recognise and celebrate the dedication and true professionalism of so many of our drivers and employers in the heavy transport industry.
I salute the crucial role your industry plays, every day of the year, in linking our economic centres and enabling the production and distribution of the commodities that we all rely on. You deliver the goods – and when you do so in an efficient, reliable way, which places the highest possible value on safety, you are truly serving our new nation.
I have outlined to you before the scale of the challenge we all face in the quest to make South Africa’s roads safer. You yourselves are well aware of our grim crash and fatality statistics and the specific problems that you face within your industry. So let me not dwell on the problems, but instead say a few words about the progress towards combating them that we have made since I last met you. And let me also share some thoughts on how initiatives like the National Driver of the Year Competition contribute directly towards helping us achieve the reform and partnership objectives spelt out in our forthcoming strategy document, The Road to Safety 2001-2005.
The Road to Safety is a framework document and a guide for action. It is not a magical formula that will wipe out offences and fatalities overnight. Nor am I saying that it is the final word on road traffic safety. But what we think it does do is for the first time to clearly identify the underlying causes of the carnage on our roads. It pinpoints all the major areas of weakness in the systems and structures we rely on to deliver road safety. It focuses systematically on the road user, the vehicle and the road environment and it says: in each area, this is what is wrong and this is what we must do; these are the things we must change and the attitudes and behaviours that we must challenge; and this is how we must concentrate all our resources to achieve maximum sustainable impact – in the short, medium and long term.
Our collective challenge now is to take this blueprint and turn it into a set of agreed, practical, co-owned action programmes in the four key areas of driver fitness, vehicle fitness, pedestrian safety and improved and upgraded road infrastructure and environment. In producing The Road to Safety we have consulted far and wide over a period of 18 months. We want this strategy to belong to the whole country – by which I mean real people, acting together in their professions, their workplaces, their social organisations, their religious and cultural groupings and - last but not least – their families. We certainly want those aspects of the strategy that apply most directly to the trucking industry to fully belong to all of you who are present here today. I can’t emphasise strongly enough how important we believe partnership is for the realisation of all the road safety goals we are together trying to turn into reality: a reality that can and must be measured in dramatically reduced loss of life on our roads within the coming five years.
From your point of view, what does this mean?
Let me begin, most appropriately, with the issues of driver training, competence, awareness and responsibility. As we all know, driver error is either the direct cause or a crucial contributory factor in approximately 90% of all road collisions. Against this background, it is impossible to overstate the importance of an initiative like the National Driver of the Year competition. It is industry-inspired and industry-driven. We didn’t ask you to set it up. You did it for yourselves. It is a live and sustainable project because it is voluntary. It is practical, because it creates better and more aware drivers. In so doing it contributes directly to saving lives.
I salute all of you, the drivers, who put yourselves forward to prove your technical skills and your commitment to safe driving. I know how tough the competition is, with its pre-trip test, the theory test, the track test and the road test. And as I said last year, your participation shows that you know that to drive well requires much more than experience, important though this is.
It requires understanding and controlling a heavy, powerful, technically complicated and potentially lethal piece of machinery. It requires a strong awareness of the dangers that both the vehicle and the load you are carrying can pose to others.
It means carrying out thorough vehicle safety checks before you go on the road and carrying out equally thorough load checks whenever you have loaded or unloaded goods along the route to your destination.
It means being fit, sharp and wide-awake, so that you are fully aware at all times of the smaller vehicles, the pedestrians and the stray animals that may share the road with you along the thousands of kilometres that you travel every month. It means being alert and considerate to other users, and it means carrying an encyclopaedia of road conditions and potential road hazards in your head.
As a well trained and responsible professional driver you will observe all the rules of the road, always drive at a safe and appropriate speed and be especially mindful of following distances, breaking distances and the behaviour of other road users, particularly pedestrians. You will never accept overloading your vehicle, because you are aware of the dangers this poses to your own safety and that of other road users and the cost that we all have to bear as taxpayers for continuously rehabilitating our road infrastructure when it is unnecessarily damaged. You will never drive under the influence of liquor or drugs, and you will be well aware of the importance of resting regularly. At all times you will be courteous and display exemplary behaviour so that you may be an example to colleagues and other road users.
A competition like this reinforces all these skills and attributes. It builds professional pride and should therefore not only inspire individual drivers to be true road safety ambassadors, but also encourage more and more transport operators to become involved in the all-round promotion of driver fitness. To be a dedicated professional driver is truly an occupation of which you can be proud.
All of you gathered here tonight are leaders and examples to your industry and to the rest of South Africa. But the hard fact is that there are many – far too many – employers and drivers out on our roads who do not follow your example, and are contributing negatively to road safety and the destruction of our roads infrastructure every day.
Within the framework of our new road safety strategy we are therefore putting together a set of practical proposals for consultation with your industry that we think will begin to change all that.
The intention of these proposals is to strengthen the hand of the legitimate and conscientious employers and drivers, to create a level playing field for fair and legal competition between operators and to come down very hard on the intentional law-breakers amongst us.
I will not go into great detail here, because I don’t want to pre-empt the launch of The Road to Safety or the detailed discussions that we will be holding in the coming months with employers’ associations, drivers unions and other key role players. But I can say the following, to give an indication of where our thinking is taking us:
If we want safer drivers on our roads – and this applies to all drivers, not just professional drivers – we must start out from how they are trained and tested, and we must do everything in our power to root out the widespread driver licence scams that put drivers on our roads who have never passed or even taken the K-53 test. We are well aware that this is a very serious problem indeed. The indications are that at the very least the fraudulent licence holders out on our roads can be numbered in the tens, possibly even hundreds of thousands. These people must be got off our roads. But, more importantly, we must find ways to bullet-proof our systems against the greed and cunning of those who encourage them, supply them and profit from their irresponsibility or desperation. We have a number of practical plans in the pipeline to deal with these traffickers in death. These include:
The same general points apply to regulation of vehicle test stations and the reform of the systems and procedures that are there to ensure that Certificates of Roadworthiness mean what they say.
Again, when I launch The Road to Safety, I will be giving further details of the specific action plans that have been prepared to ensure that we systematically remove unfit vehicles from our roads.
Let me now turn briefly to some of the actions we have in mind with regard to better regulation of the environment in which you, as fleet operators and professional drivers, function. As I said earlier, the prestige and reputation of your industry is weakened by the rogues who continue to operate in your sector.
On the issue of basic competence to drive: we know that even amongst PrDP holders there are many whose licences were obtained fraudulently. In order to put a stop to this, and to ensure that all professional drivers’ skills remain up to standard, we want to bring in a compulsory practical re-test alongside the theoretical test that you take every two years. In this way – and in combination with the measures we will be introducing to cut off the issuing of crooked licences – we will be able to identify those drivers who should never have had a PrDP in the first place and either get them properly re-trained or out of the system.
On the issue of medical fitness: we know that the current annual medical examination for the PrDP is often very superficial, and that doctors often ignore various kinds of condition that can seriously affect safe driving out of a misplaced sympathy for the driver’s need to earn a living. But we say that this can’t be allowed to go on. Careless medical checks and misplaced sympathy can lead to the deaths of other people and to an increased number of crashes that may result in the spillage of dangerous substances. The new dangerous goods legislation that came into effect on 1st August needs to be supported on all sides. So we intend to tighten up the PrDP medical examination to bring it into line with international best practice, and to work with the South African Medical Council to ensure that these examinations are carried out only by an approved list of medical practitioners.
On the more general issues of fleet safety, driving hours and working conditions and vehicle overloading, we have already begun developing ideas on operator self-regulation, to be backed up wherever necessary by additional legislation, state regulation and enforcement. We have started informal discussions with operator associations in order to share preliminary thoughts and indicate the general direction of our thinking.
Very soon after the launch of the strategy we want to bring in the trade unions and the Department of Labour to create more formal consultation structures in association with the National Bargaining Councils. The issues up for discussion will be posed in terms of existing Health and Safety legislation, vehicle fitness and maintenance procedures, the possible introduction of new vehicle safety technologies and strict and comprehensive overload control measures.
Our approach to all this is that we have a clear common interest in a safe, efficient, road freight and public passenger transport industry that serves all of our people and preserves our precious infrastructure and environment. Allowing rogues to continue to operate in the industry costs many lives and causes losses to our economy that are already measured in billions of Rands. I am absolutely confident that if we make the maximum effort to confront these problems in a spirit of cooperation we will achieve results that will greatly benefit of all of us.
Of course issues will arise that are uncomfortable for the different parties in different ways. Compromise, flexibility and a focus on the wider common good will be essential to help us negotiate all of these issues successfully. But if the example of this competition and tonight’s event are anything to go by – and I am convinced that it is – then I know that we will succeed in making a critical contribution from your sector of industry to the wider goals of safer roads and a more responsible, caring society.
As South Africans, we have shown again and again that we can overcome the toughest obstacles to peace, stability, mutual understanding and progress, without compromising our pride and our dignity. We should never forget the extent to which the rest of the world recognises and honours our very special achievements over the last ten years and more. I have no doubt that we can show the world this capacity again by taking the road to safety with passion and commitment to a better life for all – now and for the future generations.
I thank you.