Transport budget debate by Transport Deputy Minister Jeremy Cronin
25 Apr 2012
Building on Minister Sibusiso Ndebele's comprehensive outline of the many different areas of sectoral responsibility of the department of Transport (DoT), I'd like to step back a little and ask some basic questions.
Why after 18 years of democracy do we still encounter so many challenges with public transport in our country? The Easter weekend road crash statistics showed a significant decline this year, thanks to a concerted effort from DoT, Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC), provinces, and the driving public. But we still have extremely high levels of road fatalities and injuries, why? Why (and these matters are not disconnected from transport) do we still have such high levels of inequality and unemployment in our society? To answer these questions it is absolutely important to understand the impact of the past on our present.
"After 18 years of democracy you can't still be blaming apartheid", I'll be told. I agree, for two reasons. In the first place, the point is not to blame the past, but to understand the ways in which it continues to shape and distort our present, so that we can change it.
In the second place, I agree, because it is far too narrow a perspective simply to blame "apartheid". Apartheid was a mid-20th century political project of the National Party, but it was not disconnected from a much longer history.
In the 1960s and 70s it was fashionable in many (largely white English-speaking) liberal circles to forget their own past and blame apartheid on the backward, "frontier" mentality of the Afrikaner. This was a convenient way of exonerating British colonialism, and the Chamber of Mines and its related banking oligopolies.
Yet, the key cornerstones of the invidious apartheid system were laid down long before 1948, land dispossession, native reserves, indirect rule through hand-picked "traditional" leaders, pass laws, the migrant labour system, and urban segregation. Apartheid was a more aggressive application of these measures in the face of the deepening challenges to the earlier colonial and segregationist policies.
The decisive process that shaped modern South Africa (SA) was the introduction, from the outside, of an advanced, capital-intensive, mining-based, industrial revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century. I don't believe we have given remotely enough weight to understanding the impact on the present (including our transport present) of this reality. The industrial revolution in SA did not emerge organically out of local small-scale, artisanal manufacturing. It arrived in a highly developed, oligopolistic form as massive joint-stock companies focused on extraction of mineral wealth for external benefit.
What once propelled spectacular growth has shaped and distorted SA's economy and our broader social realities ever since. SA's economy continues to be excessively dependent on the export of unbeneficiated minerals. Our manufacturing sector, with exceptions, is weakly developed, as is the small and medium-enterprise sector. The dominance of the mineral-energy-finance complex is hard-wired into the texture of our society.
Let's take a relatively small but telling example. Thanks to work by the National Ports Regulator, we have only recently discovered significant anomalies in our port levies regime. Port charges at our Saldanha iron ore export terminal are 47% below the global average for similar terminals. Our coal export terminal port charges are 37% below the global average. By contrast, our port charges on a full container for export (i.e. basically on locally manufactured goods) are about 415% more than the global average, and cargo dues 935% more!
Now bear in mind that iron ore mining creates on average around 500 jobs, coal mining around 1 000 jobs, and manufacturing around 3 700 jobs for every R1 billion of production and then you begin to get an inkling of one of the myriad ways a particular history, dominated by the mining-finance complex, has structured our transport system, and distorted our economy.
Written into the pricing of our transport logistics system are distortions that are part of a broader, problematic, entrenched growth path that undermines our capacity to create much higher levels of employment.
We have to change the growth path itself, and we have to ensure that our transport interventions are contributing to that transformation.
Once recognised, it is relatively easy to effect progressive changes to our port charges, for instance. This is exactly what lay behind President Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation Address (SoNA) February announcement of a R1 billion rebate on port charges for manufactured exports.
It is considerably more complex to develop a comprehensive policy including a comprehensive transport freight logistics policy to tackle the web of factors that continue to strangle the development of our industrial base. When we do try, we are told the state "shouldn't second-guess the market". But business as usual will simply reproduce all our structural flaws.
If our mining-led industrial revolution shaped and distorted our logistics network, it also required vast quantities of coerced, unskilled migrant labour, and this meant deliberate spatial engineering. Migrant labour, subsidised by families locked into poverty-stricken subsistence in so-called homelands, is no longer a central feature of our labour market.
But through the 20th century, segregationist urban settlement controls increasingly reproduced the same structural reality. The black working class was settled in remote, peri-urban reserves, dormitory townships, far enough away from the commanding heights of power and wealth to be contained and controlled, close enough to be migrated daily to work in factories, shops, and white suburban homes.
This has resulted in a persisting, racialised urban geography. Black workers and the urban poor continue to be hugely disadvantaged by their geographical marginalisation in dormitory townships. The average public transport trip in London is 8 kilometres, in Tshwane it is 26 kilometres, in Cape Town the average bus trip is 20km. These long commutes in South African cities are typically from high density dormitory townships, along low-density corridors into Central Business Districts (CBDs) and industrial zones.
In the Mangaung metro the past is even more dramatically written into the geography of the present. The metro consists of the old Bloemfontein, still a relatively compact settlement and the former Bantustan area, Thaba Nchu, 50 kilometres away from the outskirts of Bloemfontein. Yet one-third of Mangaung's population lives in Thaba Nchu. These long distances have a massive impact on the poorest of the poor. Households in SA earning less than R500 a month are spending on average 35% of their meager household income on transport.
This pattern of urban sprawl has an extremely negative impact also on the viability of our PT systems. Large fleets are required to move millions of people every working day. But the long distances mean that often the bus fleets can only make one over-crowded trip in the morning and one in the evening peak periods.
When more than one trip is possible, the return trip is an uneconomic, empty fetching trip. At 10am in the morning in many of our major cities we have huge bus and rail fleets, subsidised by the fiscus, but standing idle. Despite R7 billion a year on bus and rail operating subsidies the financial sustainability of PT is precarious.
With growing urbanisation through the 70s and 80s, the apartheid regime increasingly gave up on spending on bus and rail transport for the dormitory townships into which they had forcibly removed the black working class. Low cost, survivalist minibuses moved into the gap. In 1975 in Johannesburg only 3% of commuters were using minibuses compared to 41% in 2000, while buses' share of the market declined from 22% to 4%, and trains from 20% to 8%.
The emergence of the minibus sector needs to be saluted as one of the outstanding examples of grass-roots, bottom-up empowerment. But minibuses are inherently not the safest, nor does the most fuel efficient mode for transporting large numbers of commuters over long distance daily. Congestion, pollution, overcrowding and road crashes are among the consequences we continue to bear as a country for having lost the viability of our mass-mover PT modes.
We won't overcome all of these challenges just through delivery of more Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses to the same faraway localities, or more bus subsidies for the same daily migratory haul. There has to be a determined effort to tackle the root causes of ongoing exclusion.
We need integrated public transport systems, mixed-use, mixed-income human settlements, and relatively dense corridor development. These are among the key strategic priorities of the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission, which has also identified getting a much greater democratic public sector grip on land use management and planning.
And that brings us to the flip-side of the same urban sprawl challenge. While the apartheid regime was forcibly removing ever growing numbers into distant dormitory townships - there was a major, private-sector led, civil-engineering and property speculator-driven programme of freeway, shopping mall and suburban housing construction in and around the outskirts of our major urban conglomerations.
Increasingly, white middle-income households moved out of the inner city suburbs of Hillbrow, Yeoville, Sunnyside and into more car-commuting, shopping-mall, peri-urban housing developments in Fourways, Somerset West, Sunninghill, and so forth. This freeway construction to serve the misplaced aspirations of white middle-income households saw average travel times for this stratum also increasing - in Johannesburg car travel times have increased by nearly 60% since 1980.
Unfortunately, because we have not always sufficiently asked ourselves what problem it is that we are trying to solve, in the post-1994 period we have also often allocated too much to car-commuting, freeway expansion - of which the current e-tolling hot potato is a glaring example.
Minister Pravin Gordhan has said that, as government, we have learnt many self-critical lessons from the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP). As the DoT we have said that IF we could re-wind the clock back to 2007 we would not recommend embarking on this project at all.
However, a R20 billion public debt has been incurred for Phase A1 (some 180kms) of what was going to be a projected 500kms and more. Minister Ndebele and MEC Vadi have categorically put on hold any further expansions of GFIP. Minister Ndebele has also clearly instructed South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) not to proceed with any other tolling projects unless much better motivation for tolling, or for the particular project (tolled or otherwise), is provided. This applies to the proposed N1/N2 toll project here in CT.
But R20bn has already been spent in Gauteng. How do we pay for the debt incurred? Increase the fuel levy, we are told. We have looked at that option and there are several reasons why Cabinet has supported Treasury in choosing not to go this route:
- Above all, it will be inequitable, we will be forcing a Lusikisiki or Mitchells Plain minibus driver to pay an extra fuel levy for freeways in Gauteng.
- What about a dedicated Gauteng fuel levy? That might have been more feasible in the days when the levy was collected at the pump, but it is now collected directly from the refineries, and so it would add a significant administrative cost to set up a Gauteng collection system.
But, of course, there is still unhappiness. One Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) affiliate issued a statement this week saying: "Our aim is to make the tolls uncollectible and force the government and SANRAL to find more equitable ways to pay for road improvements."
We empathise with the concern expressed by COSATU for those car owners in Gauteng who are not wealthy or middle-class, who cannot really afford a car, but who, equally, cannot afford not to have a car given the poor state of public transport, and the marginalisation of working people. But the trouble with the way the criticism of e-tolling is being raised is that it misses the fundamentaL issue, the "point of before".
It is not just a question of finding a more equitable way of paying for GFIP - (and this we have tried to do with exemptions for buses and minibuses, and other rebates and reductions), it is above all asking the preceding, point of before question. Was spending R20bn on freeway expansions in the richest province in SA, in which 70% of households have no access to a car, and on a road network on which only 2% of the traffic is public transport - was this an equitable, developmental priority in infrastructure spend in the first place?
If we don't ask ourselves that question the danger is that we will continue to allocate our energies and our scarce resources into projects (tolled or untolled) that reinforce dysfunctional patterns, like urban sprawl, that we have inherited from the past. And that is what has to be changed.
Issued by the Department of Transport, April 25 2012
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