Thank you.
THE DEPUTY MINISTER OF TRANSPORT: Chairperson, Minister Ndebele, MEC Carlisle, chair of the select committee the hon Pat Sibande, fellow hon members and colleagues from the Department of Transport, as the hon Carlisle knows, my habits, like his, are to be polemical, but I am going to try to resist being polemical in the face of provocation from his side. I want to talk about something in the same vein that he began to speak about, but he lost track. I think maybe because he lost something when he lost his glasses. [Laughter.]
An area which is so important for us in general in transport but specifically an area which requires co-operative governance - working across political parties, across provinces, across different spheres of government, across the private and public sectors - is the whole area of road safety. Minister Ndebele mentioned in his speech on 11 May that a massive global campaign was being launched called "The Decade of Action for Road Safety". South Africa is a very important proponent and participant in this major global campaign. I think we were in the middle of the local government elections, so we didn't quite launch it with the same fanfare, but in Sydney the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up, in Rio de Janeiro the statue of Christ was lit up, and so on. We failed to light up Table Mountain, MEC Carlisle, because I think we were all fighting the local government elections. This is a very, very important campaign.
As the Minister has mentioned, 1,3 million people around the world are dying every single year in road - not accidents, because they are not - crashes and collisions. Some 50 million people, at least, are injured seriously. This is many things. On the one hand, it's a health challenge. Unless we significantly reduce the number of fatalities on roads, not just in the world but also in our country, road fatalities - which are already killing more people than malaria - will kill more people by 2020 than the HIV and Aids pandemic. In fact, road fatalities will become the major contributor to fatalities in the world, unless we begin to reverse this trend.
In South Africa, as the Minister mentioned, at least 14 000 people are killed every single year. This places a huge burden on overburdened health care systems. In South Africa, about 40 000 people are seriously injured, many of them suffering disabilities. This is also a developmental challenge, because in terms of the global statistics, 90% of the 1,3 million people that are killed are in the developing world, in countries such as South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Pakistan, Bangladesh and so forth. So the burden of death is carried massively by developing countries, by poor countries and by countries that are the least able to deal with the consequences of this. Why? Well, because what is happening is that increasingly cars and freeways are coming into the developing world in countries such as China and India, and also here in South Africa.
This is why the hon DA member, who earlier read a motion without notice, which was then demoted to a notice of motion and intentioned for debate, proudly boasted about achievements in terms of clean audits and deliveries and so forth from certain cities and provinces in South Africa. Now, of course, clean audits are very important. Of course efficient delivery is very important. But we also need to transform the shape of our towns and cities. Why, for instance, do so many people need to travel all the way from Khayelitsha, or all the way from Soweto, to work and back again to go home? Why? Because apartheid spatial patterns are still in place. [Applause.]
I must say - not to be polemical - the most untransformed city is the city that I live in, which is my home city, Cape Town. It is the most racially untransformed city. Therefore the burden on public transport, the burden on the Metrorail system and so forth is not unrelated to the reluctance and unwillingness of the propertied classes and the parties that represent their interests to change spatial transformation. That too is part of the challenge of overcoming the huge burden of fatalities, congestion and all of these difficulties that other members across the House have mentioned. [Applause.]
This is a child rights issue as well - these fatalities and injuries. Here, in South Africa, 40% of those who are killed in road collisions are pedestrians, and a very significant number of them are children between the ages of four and eight. It is the principal cause of unnatural death in young children in South Africa, and it is the same in the rest of the developing world.
Again, because children live in squalid conditions with a freeway that runs right past them, or in a squatter camp where the clinic or the school is on the other side of the road, they are getting knocked down like flies. Freeways are built without any consideration for people on bikes, without any consideration for children on their long way to school, and so forth.
Therefore, in South Africa, it is also a national question. It is part of a struggle to overcome racial oppression in our country - the struggle for road safety in general. It is a human rights issue. The Freedom Charter - which I'm glad to see the DA now says it supports; I hope you support all of the Freedom Charter and not just some select parts of it - correctly said that we should have the freedom to move freely throughout South Africa. [Interjections.]