Chair, I take this opportunity to congratulate the Minister and the Deputy Minister on their appointment; their respective experience in transport will no doubt stand the department in good stead.
Three weeks ago, the World Health Organisation released the Global Status Report on road safety covering 178 countries and over 98% of the world's population. This study revealed that South Africa has no regular audits on existing road infrastructure.
A high quality road infrastructure is central to the economic prosperity of the country. A well-maintained road infrastructure allows people to get to work, children to get to school and just people in general to get around. A good road network also drives our economy.
Low levels of investment in infrastructure on our roads contribute to rising backlogs. Over R100 billion is needed on road maintenance. All studies, including those undertaken by the department, clearly show that it is much less costly to maintain roads than to completely rehabilitate them. We thus propose that you should launch a high priority roads programme, HPRP, to identify parts of the national, provincial and municipal roads networks with high maintenance and construction backlogs. This would eradicate backlogs in the medium- to short-term with a maximum time line of five years.
I further propose that the Department of Transport appoints a national task team to identify the unique problems confronting each province and to determine what is needed to resolve them. Specialists from the department should be temporarily deployed to provinces to assist them to eradicate these respective backlogs. These specialists would work together with provincial staff, mentoring them and empowering them with the necessary skills.
Hon Minister, transport departments are incapacitated by the shortage of technically skilled people and often there are too few engineers to perform road maintenance and upgrading. Government should offer market-related packages to skilled professionals, engineers in particular, as I mentioned, thus encouraging existing professionals to stay and to attract new ones into the department.
Underfunding is another big obstacle. Furthermore, we end up not spending funds; only when we do, to waste it on court cases, such as the over R6 million that the department had to pay simply because there were no clear road signs. Had the funds been used correctly in the first place, the department would not have had to spend this money on such legal battles.
The DA proposes that a dedicated road infrastructure fund be established to reallocate funds sourced from fuel levies towards the construction and maintenance of roads. These funds should be ring-fenced to eradicate the current backlogs and make further investments towards building new roads to increase the road network.
Government should complement this dedicated fund by offering tax rebates to companies that invest in road infrastructure. This would entice businesses to invest in such infrastructure.
As mentioned before, the state of rail infrastructure has a direct bearing on roads. Public confidence in rail transport has declined due to particularly poor safety and inefficiency. As a result, the public and business community resort to transporting themselves and their goods by road. This in turn leads to frustrating traffic congestion and overloaded vehicles putting a strain on our already overburdened roads.
A truck that is, for example, 10% overloaded causes more than double the damage of a legally loaded vehicle amounting to billions of rands of damage per annum. Improving our rail infrastructure will incentivise usage thereof, thus getting the transporting of goods and people off our roads. This in turn will then preserve our roads much longer.
Toll route companies have collected R3,6 billion in the last three years from motorists, yet their infrastructure spending remains disappointingly low with a mere R1,6 billion. Current infrastructure investment levels by toll companies should be reviewed to reflect the size of their profits. In future, new agreements should include a clause compelling all toll companies to contribute, for example, at least 20% of their profits to infrastructure development until the backlogs are eradicated. There should be incentives for these companies to do this and the quicker they do it, the better it is for them and for their profits in the long run and so everyone scores.
Hon Minister and Deputy Minister, my colleague, shadow minister Stuart Farrow and I are passionate about transport and the economic and social impacts it has on South Africa. This portfolio simply cannot be politicised as too much is at stake. I was rather disappointed to see some politicisation at our last portfolio committee meeting and I trust the chair will ensure that we work towards our common goal without the obstacle of politics. [Applause.]