Chairperson, Minister, chair of the Portfolio Committee on Transport, the hon Ruth Bhengu, fellow Members of Parliament, colleagues and MECs, the director-general and Department of Transport colleagues, I want to build on Minister Ndebele's comprehensive outline of the many different areas of sectoral responsibility for which the Department of Transport has responsibility.
But I would like to step back a little bit and ask a couple of broad, basic questions. Why, after 18 years of democracy, do we still encounter so many challenges with public transport in our country? The Easter weekend road crash statistics showed a very significant decline this year, thanks to concerted efforts from the department, the Road Traffic Management Corporation, a variety of provinces, other enforcement agencies and the driving public. We should note this and welcome it, but we still have extremely high levels of fatalities and injuries on our roads. Why? Why - and these matters are not disconnected from the broader transport issues - do we still have such high levels of inequality and unemployment in our society? To answer these questions, I believe, it is absolutely important to understand the impact of the past on our present. Some will say that you cannot go on blaming apartheid after 18 years of democracy, and I agree. I agree for two reasons. The first reason is that this is not a question of blaming; this is a question of analysing and understanding the impact of the past on the present so that we can change what is wrong in the present. [Applause.]
Secondly, I agree, because apartheid is far too narrow a perspective from which to understand this. Apartheid was a mid-20th-century political project of the National Party, but it was not disconnected from a much, much longer history. When I was a young person - I was once a young person - in the 1960s and 1970s, it was very fashionable amongst English-speaking liberal whites in South Africa to forget their own past, to blame apartheid for the problems of South Africa and to blame it on the so-called backward, frontier mentality of Afrikaners.
This was a very convenient way of exonerating British colonialism, the Chamber of Mines and the big banking houses who had all established the cornerstones of what later came to be apartheid. [Applause.] The invidious apartheid system was laid down long before 1948 - land dispossession, native reserves, indirect rule through hand-picked so-called traditional leaders, pass laws, the migrant labour system, and so forth. Apartheid was just a more aggressive application of these measures in the face of deepening challenges to the earlier colonial and segregationist policies.
The decisive process that shaped modern South Africa was the introduction, from outside, of an advanced, capital-intensive, mining-based industrial revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century. I do not believe that all of us have given sufficient attention and weight to the impact of that past on our present. The industrial revolution in South Africa did not emerge organically out of local, small-scale artisanal manufacturing. It arrived highly developed in an oligopolistic form as massive joint-stock companies focused on the extraction of mineral wealth for the benefit of outside forces.
This propelled spectacular growth in South Africa, but what once did that has shaped and distorted South Africa's economy and broader social realities ever since. Our economy continues to be excessively dependent on unbeneficiated mineral exports. Our manufacturing sector, with some exceptions, is weakly developed, as is the small- and medium-enterprise sector. The dominance of the mineral-energy-finance complex is hard-wired into the texture of our society.
Let us take a relatively small but telling example. Thanks to recent work by the National Ports Regulator, we have only recently discovered significant anomalies in our port levies regime. Hon Ollis, port charges at our Saldanha iron ore export terminal are actually 47% lower than the global average for similar iron ore terminals. Our coal export terminal port charges are 37% below the global average. [Interjections.] Yes, but by contrast, our port charges on a full container box for export - that is, of our manufactured goods such as wine or fruit juice or whatever in a container - are 415% higher than the global average.
Now, if you bear in mind that iron ore mining creates about 500 jobs, coal mining about 1 000 jobs, and manufacturing around 3 700 jobs for every R1 billion of production, then you begin to get an understanding of one of the myriad ways a particular history, shaped by this mining revolution and dominated by the mining and finance complex, has structured our transport system , amongst other things, and distorted our economy.
Written into the pricing - for instance, in this case, of our transport logistics system - are distortions that are part of a broader, problematic, entrenched growth path that undermines our capacity to create much higher levels of employment in our country. We have to change that growth path itself, and we have to ensure that our transport interventions are contributing to that transformation.
Once recognised, it is relatively easy, for instance, to effect progressive changes to our port charges. This is exactly what lay behind President Zuma's state of the nation address announcement in February this year of a R1 billion rebate on port charges for manufactured exports. So we are recognising these distortions and actively doing something about them. But it is considerably more complex, of course, to develop a comprehensive policy, including a comprehensive transport freight policy, to tackle the web of factors that continue to strangle the development of our industrial base. When we do try, we are told, often by the opposition, that you shouldn't second-guess the market - that the state shouldn't second-guess the market. But business as usual will simply reproduce all the same old flaws.
If our mining-led revolution shaped and distorted our logistics network in its own favour for exports of unbeneficiated goods, it also required vast quantities of coerced, unskilled migrant labour, and this meant very deliberate spatial engineering. Migrant labour, subsidised by families locked into poverty-stricken reserves later becoming Bantustans, is no longer the central feature of our labour market. But throughout the 20th century, segregationist urban settlement controls increasingly reproduced the same structural reality. The black working class was settled in remote, peri-urban reserves, dormitory townships - as you mentioned, hon Bhengu - far enough away from the commanding heights of power and wealth to be contained and controlled, but close enough to be migrated daily to work in factories, shops and white suburban homes.
This has resulted in a persisting, racialised urban geography. Black workers and the urban poor in South Africa are hugely disadvantaged by their geographical marginalisation in dormitory townships. They are basically reserves; they are just daily reserves. The average public transport trip in London is 8km in Tshwane it's 26km. The average bus trip in Cape Town is 20km. These long commutes in South African cities are typically from high-density dormitory townships, along low-density corridors into central business districts and industrial zones.
In the case of the Mangaung metro, the past is even more dramatically written into the geography of the present. The metro of Mangaung consists of the old Bloemfontein, which remains relatively concentrated and compact, and the former Bantustan area of Thaba Nchu, which is 50 kilometres away from the outskirts of Bloemfontein. Yet, one third of Mangaung's population lives in Thaba Nchu - without resources, without work, without amenities.
These long distances have a huge impact on the poorest of the poor. Households in South Africa earning less than R500 a month are spending on average 35% of their pathetic meagre household income just on transport and mobility.
The hon Ollis recognises this, but notice what his recommendations are: a "rhino" card, moving people faster from where they are, and better to where they are going. But it is not about transforming the white suburban pattern; it's not about transforming and deracialising the urban patterns of South Africa. [Applause.]
The pattern of urban sprawl has an extremely negative impact, also on the viability of our public transport systems. This is why they are limping. This is one of the reasons why they have huge problems. Large fleets are required to move millions of people every single working day. [Interjections.] But the long distances mean that often the bus fleets can only make one ...