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Good morning, thank you for inviting me to the launch of BusinessMap's Review of the transport industry.
I would like to thank BusinessMap for the interest it has taken in Transport and we, in government, appreciate the constructive ways in which you have contributed to the national debate.
I have not yet read this publication, so I don't know which side of that debate you are on but I am confident that your contribution, whether critical or congratulatory, will be constructive.
I am pleased to be sharing this platform with people who have made a substantial contribution to the advancement of transport in this country: Jose de Nobrega (from Investec) Mafika Mkwanazi (from Transnet) Jim Dawson (from Gibb International)
My comments will be brief, not only so that theirs can be lengthy but because I will have to leave early to give my driver enough time to get me to my next function in Mpumalanga within the speed limit!
In my five years in government I have been privileged to learn many things, and many of them have been learnt in the process of tackling the strategic challenges of Transport.
Transport plays a dynamic role, not only in South Africa's future growth prospects but in the thorough re-working of our entire social fabric.
We must remember that apartheid was a policy that sought to create artificial distances between peoples and places.
To a large measure it succeeded, and we live today with its tangible, concrete results:
* Soweto is a great deal further from Johannesburg in economic distance than it is in kilometers.
* East London's isolation cannot be measured in kilometers but also in travel time and transport cost.
* Butterworth is a backwater, not in distance but in the lack of transport infrastructure, deliberately engineered by the planners of the grand apartheid.
To get South Africa to work it is necessary to integrate the transport linkages that were cut, and to forge new ones where they are demanded by the needs of the customers, ie the people who use our transport services be they passenger or freight clients. This was one of the challenges that has faced me in my five years in office and it will face successive ministers of Transport as we unwind the legacy of the past and build an integrated transport system driven by customer needs and not to prop up ideologically driven strategies.
In the passenger sector urban corridor developments (jointly developed between my department, the various provinces and local authorities) have already provided us with opportunities to increase density through integrated development approaches linking transport, land-use and economic planning while dismantling the urban planning of the past.
The key projects embodying these principles are the Mabopane-Centurion Development Corridor, Baralink, Wetton-Lansdowne in Cape Town, Mdantsane-East London and Germiston-Daveyton corridors, and the Warwick Triangle in Durban.
In these projects and all work done in the national Department of Transport, the key questions revolved around the challenges of setting up structures and organisation that would have enough capacity and sustainablity of their own to accomplish the transformation of transport.
We restructured the national Department of Transport into a small organisation of policy makers, strategists and regulators. One of the most startling things I discovered when I became Minister of Transport was that amongst the 1,400 people employed by government there was no capacity for strategic planning.
Therefore to effect transformation an injection not only of money, but of ideas and creativity into at the transport sector as a whole was required.
To tackle the huge problems and backlogs of infrastructure, government needed to look beyond its own corridors for solutions.
This is why, from the start, I liked the idea of PPPs. That is government in partnership, learning to work together, with the private sector through the use of PPPs be they the concessioning of roads through BOTs, the outsourcing of government motor vehicle needs or the privatisation of services.
PPPs cannot become the new doctrine of development because they hinge on partnership: the coming together of different parties, for different reasons with a common goal. Transport has had some success with them because we have seen them as a win-win solution and not a catch-all solution for government's problems of infrastructure financing.
The issue before us in Transport was simply to ensure the best use of resources, through the most efficient institutional means.
There is no doubt that private sector funding and expertise must be mobilised if government is to achieve its objectives. The only question is the specific means of doing so.
Every deal is a tussle, with the private sector trying to shift risk to the government and the government firmly holding its ground.
In the past the previous government determined the scope of the jobs and provided almost unlimited guarantees, making the partnership an essentially one-sided arrangement.
Our objective has been to establish a more equal relationship and to place risk within the sector best able to shoulder it, ie the financial risk in the financial sector and government shouldering the political risk.
Some of the earlier deals, the N1 to Warmbaths for example, was more favourable for the private sector than I now consider to be necessary.
But it remains a tussle as both sides learn the meaning of partnership and understanding the new terrain the government is carving out.
The partnership route (be it privatisation, concessioning or outsourcing) has required of us that we in government focus on who our clients are and their needs. This very thorough analysis was at the core of the Moving South Africa project.
It has led us to question the precise ways in which we can serve our customers, to define a vision and our national objectives for the future as well as to provide a level playing field for the participants and to clarify the rules of the "game".
In the process we have redefined the traditional role of government as all- provider and maintainer of infrastructure. There is shifting line between the public and private sectors. Our job is to keep on re-examining where we draw it.
In some ways this change has increased the role of government as we set objectives and engage with the private sector. By moving away from being the chief bureaucratic operator we opened the door to a more creative role for government as well as the private sector.
In order to open the door to the private enterprise in the National Roads Agency we have also instituted a system of unsolicited proposals where the private sector can come forward with their ideas for major infrastructure projects instead of waiting for government tenders.
We have put in place systems to preserve intellectual property while keeping the process competitive.
I have welcomed the response we have had from the private sector as this costs them time and money.
Even on the major tendered jobs, such as the N4, the bidding consortia responded vigorously with each spending in the region of R5 million on a bid.
We even became alarmed at the scale of the response, fearing that the inevitable losers would be discouraged from future bids, or that the winners would be even further discouraged, imagining this would eliminate them from future contracts.
We soon learned, however, that in the international world of infrastructure tendering and contracting, where individual contracts run to billions of rands, massive speculative expenditure of this nature is a part of the process.
It is unfortunate that only one bidder can win. In practice, not all losers have been gracious in their defeat!
But these projects have also taught us how infrastructure projects can play a critical role in economic empowerment and job creation.
We write these provisions into all our contracts: whether they are contracts to sweep the floors at Park Station or build the N3.
For economic empowerment to be effective it requires continuing and careful monitoring and support.
We do not deal with empowerment at a contractual arms length, but are fully engaged as government. We focus on measurable empowerment results and are learning to distinguish the bogus from the real. We do not tolerate fronting, for example.
We have learned to manage some of the conflicts that empowerment brings with it. Groups of workers are sometimes thrown into opposition with each other, conflicting over their exclusive rights to certain jobs. We are learning to disaggregate the problems, tackle them piecemeal, and often resolve conflicts that previously appeared intractable.
For empowerment to succeed there must be a certain amount of risk taking on the part of the sponsoring authority, and we have put ourselves on the line, in a well managed way to achieve it.
I am satisfied that the Department of Transport is well equipped for the future. The Moving South Africa Action Agenda, launched a week ago, puts on the table a long-term strategy plan with all its trade-offs and pitfalls. It provides a measure for what we do now against the vision we have of the future.
We will not have to wait for history to judge us!
Thank you.

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