Department of Transport
| moving south africa |
| PROCESS |
Department of Transport |
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4. The Moving South Africa Process
The Minister of Transport, working through Cabinet and the Ministerial Conference of Ministers of Transport (MINCOM), retained final authority over the strategy choice. However, as with the White Paper process, Moving South Africa employed a highly consultative process in arriving at the final strategy, in order to ensure as high a degree of consensus as possible. To this end, the Department formed a 63 member Steering Committee (see Annexure 1 for members) to provide input from industry, customers, and other functions of government in all three spheres.
The Consultation Process
The consultation process has been extensive, and many national government departments were included on the Steering Committee of the project, including the Departments of Trade and Industry, Minerals and Energy, Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Public Enterprises, State Expenditure, Land Affairs, Agriculture, Constitutional Development and Provincial Affairs, and Finance. Representatives from the parastatal sector also participated in government briefings and the Steering Committee. In addition, the MSA team consulted with various Ministers and senior national government officials at critical points before finalising the strategy. Selected provincial and local government representatives participated regularly in the Steering Committee, and the project provided regular briefings at sessions of MINCOM and COLTO (Committee of Land Transport Officials). Members of the Southern African Transport and Communications Committee (SATCC) of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) also participated in Steering Committee meetings, ensuring that the regional perspective was taken into account.
Private sector representation on the Steering Committee included operators from all modes, customers of the system, civic association representatives, advocacy groups, leaders of key transport labour unions, and academic experts on transport. In addition to plenary sessions, Steering Committee members met with the team prior to major presentations to help test data and provide additional information, and check assumptions and conclusions. Steering Committee members who wanted to contribute in more depth were offered the opportunity to second resources to the project. In addition, consultation with the private sector extended well beyond Steering Committee membership.
In the first phase of the project, the team identified over 300 stakeholders, who were then invited to plenary sessions, small group, or individual meetings in order to solicit their opinions on the future direction of the transport system. Over 160 of them participated in the process, providing essential input to the project at the critical early stage.
The Team and the Data
The project team was led by the Department of Transport, with analytical support from two international consultancies, Monitor Company and Mercer Management Consulting. The team consisted of members of the NDOT, consultants, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and seconded personnel from the South African Bus Operators Association (SABOA), various Transnet divisions, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial Department of Transport and Public Works, the Northern Province Department of Transport, the Transport and General Workers Union and the Road Freight Association. (See Annexure 2 for a list of all team members over the course of the project.)
The team gathered data from multiple sources to form the underpinning of the analytic work. These sources include publicly available statistical, economic and financial sources, organizations represented on the Steering Committee as well as purchased data or original survey research performed for the project.
Project Timing
The project was organised into five phases over a period of 14 months. These five phases are summarised in Figure 2 below
Figure 2: The Five Project Phases
Guiding Principles
For the strategy to serve effectively as a set of guiding principles throughout the system (including public and private sectors, different levels of government, etc.), it was essential that all participants agree to the research and analytic methodologies, the logic of the conclusions, and the underlying data. The goal was (and still is) to develop broad ownership of the resulting approach. To facilitate this process, Moving South Africa adopted a set of guiding principles to ensure that as many participants as possible understood the facts and supported the objectives. These principles required the strategy to be:
Focused: the project could not examine every issue in transport, but had to focus on the key long-term strategic issues facing South Africa
Data Driven: the analyses, conclusions, and strategy must be based on hard data, not opinion. This is one critical way in which Moving South Africa is distinguished from the White Paper. Moving South Africa expended significant effort to gather the data required to give the project a firm grounding, and additional effort to ensure that as many participants as possible agreed to the baseline data.
Consultative: as described above, the project made every effort to be as inclusive and consultative as possible, to ensure a broad range of opinions in guiding the strategy formulation
Transparent: to the extent possible, the project operated transparently, open to scrutiny from all members of the public. The exceptions occurred when some operators only provided critical data under the condition of confidentiality – but the final reports from each phase include confidential data from operators that has been approved for public release.
Capacity Building: a subsidiary objective of the project was to build human capacity, both at the level of the Steering Committee and within the Department itself. The capacity building goal entailed creating the ability, in the Department and in the sector, to understand and continually refine and develop the strategy long after the consultants have left the project. For the NDOT, this involves a conscious decision to use the opportunity to develop a core strategic planning capacity.
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