Chairperson, Minister Ndebele, MEC Cele, hon members, Director-General of Transport and your colleagues from the department, friends and colleagues, a few weeks ago I had the privilege of addressing the select committee when we tabled the Department of Transport's strategic plan.
I would like to use today's input to just dwell on some of the issues that I raised in that particular meeting. I know from my 10 years in Parliament - Chairperson, I know that you're one of the champions of this - that the purpose and strategic role of the NCOP is not often appreciated, particularly by colleagues over in the National Assembly. Maybe, sometimes also here in the NCOP as well, there's a sense of "Who are we?" And I think the NCOP sometimes gets treated as a poor relative.
What I really want to say today is that, certainly from a transport perspective, the role and importance of the National Council of Provinces is absolutely crucial. If you are going to deliver infrastructure and public transport - a range of things - effectively, then your role is really critical. I really wanted to make that point.
When it comes to road infrastructure, for instance, the hon Groenewald correctly said that we've got many challenges in terms of maintenance, upgrading and so on. Failure to do that sets us further back. He is absolutely right.
He then said that the national Department of Transport needs to get more qualified civil engineers. That may be the case, but a lot of maintenance and infrastructure development problems lie with provinces and local government. This is not necessarily their fault, but we need an intelligent and strategic discussion about how we allocate resources to infrastructure, bridges and so forth. How do we ensure that those resources are then spent on infrastructure?
We think that at a national level, the SA National Roads Agency Ltd, Sanral, is by and large doing quite well in terms of the maintenance and development of road infrastructure, the N-routes. However, the great majority of kilometres of routes are actually with other spheres of government, and there are many challenges.
We think that you have a strategic role to play, one, in terms of oversight, but also, two, in contributing to the policy debate as to how we most effectively allocate resources to make sure that we are doing this.
This also applies to public transport. By the way, hon Cele, in the medium- term budgets for the years 2011-12 the public transport infrastructure grant envisages some R5,1 billion for infrastructure, and government's perspective is that we need then to shift, in that year, to a major focus on rural transport infrastructure.
We've used the 2010 hosting to increase our transport budget quite successfully. Cabinet has let us use 2010 to make sure that we have a legacy of public transport, for the first time. This is because we don't have decent public transport at all in South Africa. We've done quite well in terms of getting a budget, but, of course, that budget, as the hon Cele has correctly said, has tended to go to cities. I understand his impatience, but at the same time we do understand that it's not just in cities that there are problems of public transport, as there are also huge problems in rural areas. Certainly, it is our intention, particularly from 2011-12, to shift the emphasis of infrastructure transport spending to rural areas.
As we look back on the past 15 years of democracy, we can see that we've done many good things together. Led by the ANC government, all of us as South Africans have done many good things in transforming our country. However, there are areas where we seem to have reproduced poverty and inequality, which is by and large racialised inequality.
One of the problems has to do with this spatial arrangement, the spatial legacy of South Africa. What happened before the apartheid period is that the black majority was forced into marginalisation, either into dormitory Bantustans and reserves, or into peripheral townships on the edges of our cities.
That means, from a public transport perspective, moving people effectively and efficiently was hugely complicated. Even today, we have this legacy where public transport is not public transport that is being used all day, throughout the day, and so on. It's one way in the mornings and one way in the evenings, to dump people back in their dormitory townships. No resources, no facilities and so on. This poses huge challenges for all of our cities and towns as to how we have sustainable public transport that serves people and begins to change things.
What we realise is that we can't do it alone, as the Department of Transport; we need to work closely with our municipalities and their integrated transport plans and development plans. We need to work very closely with our provinces and the Human Settlements department, which is no longer just the Department of Housing, because we're not just thinking of housing as rows of RDP houses located in the same distant localities. Let's start to think about human settlements, where there are resources, facilities, such as sporting facilities, jobs, and so forth, which are not far away from where people have historically been dumped.
We need to also work very closely with the Planning Commission in the Presidency to make sure that we start to change the way in which space is allocated in South Africa, so that we don't continue just to reproduce racialised inequality, which we have done over the past 15 years. When apartheid ended, the market took over. So, when we built RDP houses, we built one million in five years - which is an amazing achievement - and three million now, after 15 years. In order to do that massive expansion of houses within the space of 15 years, and within the budget, we locate them in the same low-cost areas in terms of property.
Again, the market itself has reproduced these inequalities of space at a huge cost to poor people in terms of travel and in terms of time to get anywhere in order to access their basic rights. So, we've got to change that. Transport itself can also be a catalyst for changing this.
Many speakers have already mentioned the fact that we need to have integrated public transport systems, including, but not just, Bus Rapid Transit systems, BRTs. Instead of these sterile freeways congested with cars, we need decent routes where businesses, mixed-income housing, all kinds of facilities and so on, are all along the routes. The routes themselves become democratic spaces where rich and poor, black and white, old and young use the public transport and contribute to a new sense of nation-building and solidarity.
So, public transport is very important and, therefore, hon Cele, I hope you'll forgive us for spending a bit of money in the cities and towns where there are big problems of congestion, in order to begin to democratise the space, time and allocation of resources in order to transform people's ordinary lives.
What have been the problems? One of the problems, as we look back, has been that many of the transport responsibilities have been fragmented into different spheres of government. For instance, planning, in terms of the old National Land Transport Transition Act, was primarily a municipal function, as it should be. Integrated development plans also integrate transport plans, and the two obviously needed to be linked.
However, when it comes to subsidies, for instance, the bus subsidies have been a provincial function. The Metrorail subsidy function has been a national function - okay. The regulatory functions, for instance in terms of operating licences, have tended to be a provincial function.
This has been the case not necessarily because people were competing for turf - although sometimes they were - between different spheres of government. It has been a recipe for a lack of co-ordination: planning in one place; regulation in another; and subsidies in another place, and therefore the things not adding up together.
Therefore the NCOP, towards the end of last year - obviously the NCOP of the previous Parliament - passed the new National Land Transport Act. This Act said: Let us, as quickly as possible, locate regulation, licensing, subsidies, where possible, and planning in one place so that you don't have things pulling in different directions. In particular it said: Let us begin with the 2010 host cities. Let us try and locate all of those things like the operating licensing, the subsidies, the infrastructure spend and the planning with the host cities and any other municipalities that are capable - obviously not all would be capable all at once of doing these things.
We need to move towards the implementation of that National Land Transport Act, which I think will go a long way. We can't do that unless our colleagues in the NCOP also play a very active role in oversight over the provincial executives and over the towns and cities in their areas. So, we really call upon you to be activists in this process.
The same applies - I see my time is running out - to bus subsidies. My colleagues will remember that at the beginning of this year, we ran out of bus subsidies and there was a huge crisis. This year, we estimate that again we are going to have a similar problem. This year things, from a provincial point of view, have become more complicated because now the subsidy doesn't go via the national department to provinces; it goes directly to provinces, in terms of the Division of Revenue Act. Therefore, we call on provinces and yourselves in the NCOP to be very vigilant about how we are going to use the bus subsidy allocation. From the national department, we are going to campaign with Treasury to make sure that there is an improved allocation for bus subsidies in provinces.
At the same time, unless provinces make a good case for how they are going to be spending that subsidy, it's going to be very difficult for us. So, in short, colleagues, thank you for the inputs that I've heard so far. My main message is: We need an activist, vigilant, but co-operative NCOP, if we are to achieve a major turnaround - as I'm sure we will - in terms of public transport and transport in South Africa. Thank you. [Applause.]