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Madam Speaker, I am pleased that in this, my last speech to Parliament, I am introducing a Bill that breaks new ground in co-operative governance in our country.

Over the past five years as Minister of Transport we have grappled with the problem of lawlessness on our roads and the difficulty of co-ordinating the efforts of national, provincial and local government without institutional mechanisms to embrace all three.

We have had some success with the three Arrive Alive campaigns where for the first time we joined forces on all three levels of government, but the gains were clearly unsustainable without the institutional means of co-ordination.

The scale of the problem is clear: we have approximately 7,000 traffic officers employed by 500 different authorities.

The cry often goes up to employ more traffic officers. I agree we need more traffic officers, but to employ them in the current situation would be to throw people and money at a problem without clearly understanding the problem and therefore with little likelihood of success.

Out of our evaluation of Arrive Alive we set up a working group drawn from national and provincial departments of Transport to come up with the model which is before this House today: The Road Traffic Management Corporation.

Linked to the Road Traffic Management Corporation Bill are two other Bills relating to road traffic:

* the National Road Traffic Amendment Bill; and
* the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Amendment Bill.

The first Bill is a new piece of legislation while the other two are consequential amendments to existing legislation in support of the first Bill.

In road traffic management we have been constrained on all three levels of government by:

* a lack of uniformity especially with regard to legislation, the appointment of agents, tariff structures and operational policies to name a few;
* training, equipment, human resources and infrastructure are inadequate to cope with our demands;
* poor communication between the different levels of government; and the prevalence of fraud and corruption in certain areas.

The need for institutional mechanisms to eliminate or minimize these constraints, drove us to review the whole system of management of road traffic in our country.

These three Bills are the product a collective consultative process on all three tiers of government to re-engineer the management of road traffic in a sustainable in order to begin to reverse the carnage and abuse of our roads.

From an institutional perspective, the Corporation consists of the Shareholders Committee, the board, the chief executive officer, the managers of 10 functional units (including road traffic law enforcement, vehicle registration and licensing, vehicle and roadworthiness testing, and the testing and licensing of drivers) as well as professional, technical, administrative and support staff.

The Shareholders' Committee is the governing body of the Corporation and consists of the national Minister of Transport, the Members of the nine provincial Executive Councils responsible for road traffic and two representatives of the South African Local Government Association (Salga).

The Corporation will be funded through a flexible, broad-based funding base comprising:

* a percentage of transaction fees earned through the provision of road traffic services;
* fines and penalties for contracted law enforcement;
* interest on invested cash balances; and
* monies appropriated by Parliament.

These funds generated by the Corporation provide an income stream that will be used to defray the costs of activities such as road traffic law enforcement and rad safety education.

The Corporation gets its powers from the RTMC Bill and the National Road Traffic Act to monitoring road traffic service provision and research; and the management and control over road traffic service provision, which includes:

* road traffic law enforcement
* education of road users
* traffic information
* registration and licencing of vehicles
* learner's and driving licences
* road worthiness of vehicles.

The Corporation will ensure road traffic service provision through the conclusion of contracts with business groups.

A major focus area of the Bill is road traffic law enforcement through voluntary contracts for the provision of enforcement services concluded with provincial and local authorities. The advantage of contracted law enforcement for the authorities is that the Corporation will bear the costs of enforcement.

In addition, the Corporation will develop a National Road Traffic Law Enforcement Code to will bind all road traffic law enforcement authorities irrespective of whether they carry out road traffic law enforcement in terms of a contract with the Corporation.

The Road Traffic Management Corporation takes us forward because:

* it brings all three tiers of government together to work as an integrated unit for improved road traffic service provision;
* it manages road traffic in accordance with sound business principles and establishes a sustainable income stream for road traffic management; and it has the mechanisms to closely monitor road traffic service providers to ensure that they provide a quality service as well as detect corruption more quickly so that it can be effectively dealt with.

In conclusion, I would like to urge you to support this Bills as it provides the long-term institutional arrangements for sustainable road traffic management and thus contribute towards reducing the carnage on our roads.

Issued by Didi Moyle, PA and Media Liaison Officer to the Minister of Transport,
cell: 082 808 5108

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