Chairperson, Minister, chairperson of the portfolio committee, Sis Ruth, hon members, friends and colleagues from transport, there was a wonderful headline in yesterday's Business Report and it reminded me of a story that the late Joe Slovo liked to tell. It was probably an apocryphal story, but he liked to tell it.
In 1956 there was the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Its then General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, launched an absolutely unprecedented attack on the Communist Party during the previous Stalin years. He spoke to a hushed audience of delegates of several hundred strong, he condemned the Stalin personality cult, and he began to uncover some of the horrible crimes that had been committed against Soviet citizens.
Three quarters of the way through his speech an anonymous voice from amongst the delegates called out: "But where were you, Comrade Khrushchev, when these crimes were happening?" Khrushchev stopped in his tracks, put his speech down, looked up with a hard glint in his eyes, and said: "Who said that?" There was absolute silence in the auditorium. After a minute Khrushchev went back to his speech and, gesturing out there, said: "Yes, that's where I was, in those years." [Laughter.]
I was reminded of that by the headline of the story in yesterday's Business Report: "Where was everyone at the start of the toll gantry talks?" I am referring, of course, to the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project. The story goes on, and to quote briefly from it ...