Thank you very much to members who participated in the debate by addressing this House and by listening. We thank you very much for the inputs. Thank you to my colleagues from the transport family, MEC Vadi and MEC Shongwe. Thank you for coming and thank you for Salga's very valuable input. We need to respond to the fact that almost all matters of transport are national, provincial and local. We do need to work in conjunction with each other much more than we have been doing up to now, while we were setting ourselves up. Thank you very much for that.
Let me start by saying that the key issue we have is that altogether R22 billion has to be spent before 2014. This is going to be important. It must be unimaginable for any of us to go back to Treasury saying we were not able spend the R6,4 billion this year, the R7,4 billion next year and the R8,4 billion the following year. That will require the identification of roads because the vision and the programme are important but money is the answer to all those things. Once the money is there, let us use it and ensure that it is actually being directed to where it should be.
When I was speaking earlier I said that other than that R6,4 billion or R22 billion all in all, we have an extra R1 billion that has been made available by the SA National Roads Agency Ltd, Sanral, specifically for access roads, rural roads and provincial roads. Therefore, where the province and municipality can't reach, it can appeal for that money to be made available. That money will be made available. So let us identify that very clearly and use it to move forward.
We need to expand the programme that we have embarked on, particularly the one with my colleague, Mr Vadi, the MEC for transport in Gauteng. In particular we really need to deal with the issue of the corruption that is pervading our licensing department. When MEC Vadi took me to centres in Langlaagte, he was given fresh information that his people had just arrested someone with 2 000 blank driving licences.
You need to know that they were caught because it means that action is being taken to deal with the problem. All of us must be in a real partnership with regard to this and with what we do in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and elsewhere. All colleagues really need to deal with this and also to communicate it, because once thieves and fraudsters know they are being caught in Gauteng, they run to KwaZulu-Natal. Once they know they are being caught in KwaZulu-Natal, they run to Limpopo. They must know they will be caught everywhere and that there is no place to hide. They must know that they will actually get arrested and this becomes a very important example.
I think the idea of all of us signing up for the Decade of Action for Road Safety is actually quite important. Let us be activists for road safety for this decade in order to reduce this carnage. We really can't have 1 000 people dying per month, 250 people dying per week, 14 000 or 12 000 people dying per year. There are widows, widowers and orphans and, as a nation, we just cannot afford that.
It is not because we have cars, because people in countries that have more cars than us are driving much more safely. Let us introduce this culture of safer roads. As we create a democratic South Africa, let us also work for democratic roads. Democratic roads are where you know that roads are a shared space. It is not your road, it's a road for all of us, just as this is not your country but our country. Let us share that. That culture must begin on the road and must be enforced. [Applause.]
Debate concluded.