Thank you, Chair. No disrespect, but my name is "Carlisle".
It gives me great pleasure to follow on the previous speaker, and particularly to follow on my hon national Minister. I also recognise my MEC colleagues from KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.
One of the earlier Ministers speaking here said one of the problems - he mentioned certain politicians, but I think it applies to most politicians - is that we don't listen. Now I wonder how many of you listened carefully to what the national Minister had to say, because that was one of the most serious and concerning speeches I have ever heard in politics.
He said a number of things, but he said two things specifically. He said that R75 billion was required to bring the maintenance backlog into some kind of manageable form and to that he could contribute an extra R1 million.
He went on to say - let us take it that this is very clearly with regard to Metrorail and our whole passenger community service - that if we do not act now, that is to recapitalise our rail fleet, the urban passenger rail system could collapse in all our cities within the next decade.
I cannot overstate to members in this Place how serious those two statements are. I happen to know that they are factually correct. I believe that they go far beyond the boundaries of party politics. There is no place here to score political points.
We listened earlier to debates on economic development. Let me tell members economic development is not worth a fig if your transport systems fall apart. Don't even waste your time with it. And what we are witnessing and what the hon national Minister of Transport is telling us is that our transport systems are falling apart.
Now the importance of this body, sir, is that it's a transversal body as far as the country is concerned; and I would hope that every member within this body will be asking himself or herself, "How do I work with my colleagues here regardless of their party affiliation to try and change the situation which the national Minister of Transport has put to us?"
How do we bring pressure to bear on the National Treasury to change the spending priorities? Because as any of my colleagues here who have been to parts of Africa and Central America, as I have, know, when transport goes, the economy goes and everything else goes with it. Let me just supplement certain of the things that the hon Minister said. He said he had inherited a gaggle of public entities and that his inheritance was in many cases chaos or corruption or both. His passion for road safety, which I share, is blunted and destroyed by the failure of the justice system to bring consequences to bear on the killers on our roads.
I want to concentrate, as in a sense he did, on the key area of public transport. Now, our apartheid cities make public transport a very difficult thing. They provide us with the longest commutes in the world. They make our cities upside down because whereas normal cities are highly concentrated in population terms at the centre and it declines outwards, ours go the other way. Therefore, in Johannesburg the dense concentrations of population are far out and they have to be brought in. Only public transport can bridge that apartheid divide.
However, if we look at patterns of mobility, and this is where I believe this House has a key role to play, what we are seeing is the use of private transport. This is largely restricted to the middle, upper middle and upper classes - largely white but also obviously including other population groups. That pattern is on the rise.
There is huge congestion. The hon Minister has spoken about maintenance. In fact, that's where the funding is going: on huge periphery roads, particularly in the Gauteng area. We are not prepared to have them here, okay.
So what we are doing is putting the money where the private transport is and yet the imperative of public transport is to provide mobility to those who do not have their own transport. And so we have to bring pressure to bear on National Treasury to begin to shift that priority from the creation of these massive periphery roads into the needs of Soweto and Khayelitsha and Mabopane's public transport. That's where the shift has to occur.
With regard to the situation with public transport, the hon Minister spoke of rail so I can speak about a few other things. The situation is such that the subsidy, the Dora, Division of Revenue Act, grants from Transport are effectively declining for the three areas that have a bus subsidy, and the department looks upon the subsidy as an expense when in fact it's an investment that grows the economy of this country. Bus transport is in decline in every single city in South Africa; in some it has virtually disappeared - like eThekwini.
Taxis will never be able to take up that total shortfall that is occurring in our public transport. They themselves are faced with overtrading, with overcompetitive attitudes, and congestion is killing them as surely as it is killing the bus trade.
Train and rail needs to be the backbone, sir. We have, certainly in the Western Cape, in the area of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, a very good rail network; no question about it, that can carry millions of people to work.
We are, however, short of 8 000 coaches and motor coaches, and very few are being built. At the current rate of building it will take about 70 years to make those up, by which stage the whole situation will be out of control.
We cannot cope without rail in South Africa and the situation that is now being created by this is appalling. If you travel from Khayelitsha into Cape Town, which is the busiest commuter line and has the heaviest volume in South Africa, higher than Mabopane, then you have trains that are meant to carry 2 300 people that are carrying in excess of 4 200 passengers. And I must tell you, the conditions under which the commuters travel are an outrage to their human dignity and human rights. It is a situation that we have to change. As I say, it goes beyond petty party politics.
Virtually every commuter coming into Cape Town or into the employment areas - and not only in Cape Town, but also in the other metros - is almost inevitably late for work no matter what they do. Buses and trains in Cape Town run on average about 40 minutes late. In some of the other metros it's much worse than that.
It's pointless to talk about economic development and deregulating Eskom if we can't make our transport systems work. So, we are faced with this: There is no magic about a public transport system. It's not difficult to run. The legislation is there, the skills are there. We have the manufacturing capacity in South Africa to build what we need at Capital Park, but we do not have the money. But the money is there!
I don't want to talk about where some of the money went - the money is there, the country has the money to do it and it has no alternative but to spend money here.
What we have to do between ourselves is to establish how we change the spending patterns and the spending priorities so that the people may move and enjoy the freedom which they deserve.