The Road to Safety

2001-2005

Managing the Strategy

In the preceding pages we have repeatedly emphasised the need for inter-governmental and cross-sectoral coordination of interventions, including the creation of effective mechanisms for sustained private sector and community participation.

The diagram that follows offers a graphical representation of the interactions between political structures—Cabinet, Parliament and Mincom—and oversight and implementing structures—RTSB, implementing departments, agencies and other crucial stakeholder groupings.

The Strategy Development Group is the only element in the structure that is not a permanent feature of the delivery process, having been assigned the specific, time-limited task of formulating a new road safety strategy for South Africa through the consultative process described in the preceding pages. With the publication of this document, The Road to Safety, its formal role comes to an end. But since its participants were drawn from a number of other structures represented in the diagram, they continue to play active management roles in these structures, from which secondment to a reconfigured Strategy Management Group will be possible. It is envisaged that such a Group should be constituted as soon as the current restructuring process with respect to COTO sub-committees is completed.

Finally, it is worth noting that the links between the category "Stakeholder Groups" in the diagram are both vertical (to national structures) and—probably more importantly—horizontal: to provincial and local government authorities and Community Road Safety Forums. These linkages represent the crucial terrain of sponsorship, public-private and community partnerships.

A Note on Costing the Strategy:

In the pages that follow the Management Diagram, it will be seen that the short to medium term implementation steps that we set out do not include costing details. Though considerable work has already been done to ensure that we are in fact able to deliver on everything we say we are going to do, we need to retain an element of flexibility with regard to how we deploy our resources between the various areas of intervention. We have taken the view that to publicly assign definite figures to each intervention would constrain our room for manoeuvre to an unacceptable degree. In effect, what we are saying is: we need the flexibility to make creative shifts of direction with regard to resource mobilisation and expenditure management over the full five-year term of the strategy. Judge the strategy on its outputs and outcomes.