Hon Chairperson, hon Minister, hon MECs present here, hon members of the National Council of Provinces, NCOP, hon members who are special delegates and distinguished guests, receive my warm greetings from the North West province. It is an honour for me to take part for the first time in the proceedings of this august Council today. During the old days when the mode of transportation was rudimentary, people lived longer and died happier. There were no traffic lights, no complex road infrastructure, no traffic signs, no need for speed limits and no air pollution. When you wanted to travel somewhere, you had to walk long distances or use bikes or donkey carts. Life was enjoyable.
Then came modernity, or the so-called industrial age. We invented cars, steam engines and steel. Trains became our mode of transport. Planes soon followed, and we had to create roads to accommodate new modes of transportation. The consequences were not inconsequential. What we found, to our surprise, was that modernity was no panacea. Speed or convenience was not always good for us. We now had to contend with planning how fast our cars should travel and what safety features cars should have. Should they have only airbags or should they also have safety belts?
Policy-makers changed to accommodate technology, but while we were still trying to figure out how to deal with that we already had a new phenomenon to deal with, namely that the cars that we were driving and the kind of development that we were pursuing were not good for the atmosphere. Gases emitted into the atmosphere were affecting the ozone layer, which was supposed to protect the earth against the sun's radiation. So, the heat coming from the sun was no longer buffeted by anything, or the layer was significantly eroded, hence we have global warming or what is scientifically called the "greenhouse effect".
So, transport is inextricably intertwined with our developmental process. Our future transportation system will have a direct impact on our ability to reduce our carbon footprint. Integrated mass public transportation is no longer a matter of "if" but of "when".
We need to dream big and be bold, because our development is going to come from new ideas being built on existing good ideas. The foundation is there; all we need to do is build on it. It cannot be that for us to come to Cape Town, we first have to catch a plane in Johannesburg or even travel only by plane to Cape Town. We should, if we want to, have a plane that can travel from North West via Gauteng and stop in Cape Town. Travel by land is sometimes more enriching than travelling by plane. You see a lot of things, learn the geography of your country and get to know its landscape.
As we celebrate October, let us do so mindful of the fact that our road fatalities are the worst in the world and that we have to do better by, among other things, going back to the basics. We should enforce laws that are on our Statute Book already, for example, putting on a safety belt. However, people nowadays tend to put safety belts behind their backs to avoid the constant noise the car makes when the seat belt is not put on. Today's cars are so sophisticated that they actually alert you when you do not have it on, so you no longer have an excuse for not wearing a seat belt.
As drivers we can actually reduce car accident fatalities by adhering to road traffic rules and not attempting to show off our cars by speeding past other drivers because we think that their jalopies are not meant for the road. We also have to take a "no prisoners" policy approach when it comes to vehicles that are not roadworthy. The national traffic police have done a wonderful job in recent months by impounding buses that were on the road without having undergone a proper inspection. It is precisely these buses that have caused unnecessary or even sometimes avoidable deaths on our roads, killing our future leaders. In North West, nine teachers recently died in one accident. We had that tragedy in our province.
We know how it feels to lose institutional memory because someone failed to assess their vehicle before the journey or, in exceptional cases, a taxi driver did not sleep the previous night and then has to take people to a meeting, only to be fatigued, lose concentration and end up in a crash. We need to do soul-searching and ask whether we are doing the right thing by not introducing reliable and competitive mass transit into the public domain. When will our wake-up call come?
I think the country is ready for a countrywide speed train. I think the country is more than ready to know that we can no longer have just Gauteng and Cape Town leading the way in the 21st century and leaving behind other provinces. We also want to be part of those lawmakers that reverse the train drain, a phenomenon caused by overcrowding. We want our province to also have a brain gain, and the country as a whole should proportionally share in the human capital of its people. Our constituencies sometimes ask us whether we are not one country. "Why does Gauteng or Cape Town have that and we do not have it in our province?" "Are we living in another country?" These are some of the questions we are unable to answer in our constituencies. When we go back I want to assure them - as you have said today, hon Minister - that we will be the same as Gauteng and Cape Town. [Applause.]
Transportation, then, is going to be a key ingredient in our cooking mix of development. We should be on time and safe when travelling, as we cannot afford to have inefficient and ineffective public mass transport.
As we all know, the time of the year is approaching when our people will be visiting families and friends and going on holiday. The next two months will be crucial. Safety will therefore be a non-negotiable for government, in the case of both pedestrians and drivers. The two have to be judicious when they use the road. A sense of courtesy has to prevail, especially from driver to driver and pedestrian to driver.
The theme "Moving South Africa safely on time" encapsulates the ideal situation that ought to prevail on our roads and the fact that we have October as Transport Month is not window-dressing. The timing could not be more right. The awareness has to begin now, because in Setswana we say: Ditlamelwana tsa pula di baakangwa go sale gale ... [Make hay while the sun shines].
This means that it is better to prepare now than later.
From a provincial standpoint, we would like to see an integrated transport system that reduces the amount of time we spend on the roads. We would like to have a bullet train that makes Gauteng and Cape Town no longer just another province but cities that you can be employed in and commute to and from daily without necessarily having to relocate to them.
Our railway system, therefore, has to be refurbished. It has to provide competition to other public modes of transportation and be user-friendly. In our province, we no longer have a train that people can use as a means of transport. The advantage of a train is that, even though it is slow, it can ferry many people at once across the breadth and length of the province. We call on the national government to ensure that we have a single train that can go from east to west and from south to north in our country. This will help spur economic opportunities across the country.
Hon Minister, we learnt that you were saying, "Batho sonke, sihamba sonke" and that the North West province has been allocated R501 million. Please, we humbly request you to go and recheck, as this is not the case. We do not have that amount in our province. [Applause.]