THE CITIZEN
BY GERTRUDE MZIZI MPL
IFP LEADER, GAUTENG PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURE

Those, like us in the IFP, who were hoping for a fresh start in the Gautrain saga in 2006 must have been disappointed. The old certainties of the project’s increasing cost and stagnant benefits prevail. Another certainty is the protracted debate about the Gautrain. How can we make it more meaningful?

This debate has turned into a thoroughly self-serving exercise and, for many involved in it, an end in itself. For those in charge of the project, the debate has become a lucrative venture. As long as they are debating, they have a livelihood and not a bad one.

Now is the time to ask the big question. Does the Gautrain really intend to serve Gauteng commuters? Or is it another bottomless source of tenders awarded to friends and relatives? Can it be another Arms deal in the making? If it is this internal tension that needs to be resolved, it is just as well that the debate, as the project leader Jack van der Merwe tells us, will take "as long as it needs".

The project was rushed through the parliamentary transport portfolio committee with alarming haste. As a result, negotiations over the nature of private-sector involvement, talks about ticket prices and legal challenges from residents affected by the route have not been resolved. All this has now come back to haunt the project.

In practice this means that all deadlines that kept the project in check have been conveniently sacrificed. Most notably, the Gautrain no longer feels inhibited by the 2010 World Soccer Cup which helped to prompt it in the first place. The delays, as they pile up, will inevitably add to the final cost.

The only consolation, after all, is the ongoing debate. On one level, it has been exhausted. The arguments cannot transcend their logical limitations. Those of the pro-Gautrain camp have been largely idealistic. The project management sees things as they should be as opposed to as they really are.

Van der Merwe, for one, wants Gauteng’s transport network to compete with the cities like New York, London, Hong Kong and Paris, forgetting the reality of South Africa as essentially a third world country at worst, and an emerging market economy at best.

By insisting on a route that shuns Soweto, the project manager is determined to reaffirm Gauteng’s apartheid geography. He ignores that fact that the Sowetans are the ones most itching to be incorporated into the formal sector of the economy, which the Gautrain symbolises and glorifies.

The opposition to the project shares the pragmatism of the private sector which instinctively recoils from a bad investment. The project is not cost effective and nothing proves this better than the shopping list compiled by the Mail & Guardian. The R20-billion earmarked for the Gautrain could buy, among other things, 118.000 minibus taxis.

We in the IFP are realists. If we take the Gautrain to be a fait accompli, which the present political pressures render it to be, the debate around it must find a suitable niche. We must consider how the project can be better integrated with Gauteng’s present transport network.