Empowerment in the mining sector is key – Gordhan
THE SA NATIONAL Roads Agency (Sanral) does not have any objections to an independent inquiry into road construction costs and would welcome the opportunity to participate in such an inquiry and state its case.
But Vusi Mona, the head of communications at Sanral, said such an inquiry should have a sufficiently wide mandate to also investigate the manipulation of figures by critics of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) project, the credentials and experience of “experts” and the role of pressure groups to disseminate “alternative facts” to the media.
Sanral was responding to the deeper report into road construction costs in South Africa released on Monday by the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa).
Mona labelled Outa’s new report a “rehash” of the organisation’s earlier research report on the GFIP.
Wayne Duvenage, the chairperson of the organisation, said on Monday that even if Outa’s calculations were out by about 20 percent, the cost of the GFIP would have increased to about R12 billion compared to the excessive R18bn Sanral paid.
Duvenage added that if the GFIP had been built for about R10bn, the decision on electronic tolling could never have happened.
‘We remain of the view that the tender process was sound and there was no corruption’
However, Mona said Outa was again comparing projects that were incomparable and compounded this basic error by generalising about complex engineering projects.
Mona stressed the premise that there was a single or specific unit cost for road construction was a fiction, with the costs differing widely depending on a multitude of factors.
Outa benchmarked the cost of six projects in the overall GFIP project with other international projects, including projects in Ethiopia, the US, Western Europe and Greece.
Duvenage said all of these project cost less on a cost-asquare-metre basis than the GFIP and every one of these projects was more complex and involved new roads compared to the GFIP.
Mona refuted Outa’s allegations it was not given access to the information they were seeking about the GFIP.
Sanral subscribed to the Promotion of Access to Information Act and through a letter had informed the organisation in July last year it would be given full access to this information but to date it had not taken up this offer, Mona said.
Collusion
He said Outa’s claim that Sanral had not done anything about the collusion by construction companies was “patently false” because to the best knowledge of the agency it was the only government entity that had followed up this matter with both civil and criminal action.
“We remain of the view that the tender process was sound and there was no corruption from Sanral’s side – the tender process had integrity. We were the victims of a crime and therefore reported the matter to the SAPS, where a statement was made,” he said.
Mona stressed it was important for Sanral to move forward with road expansion in Gauteng to prevent debilitating congestion in the near future. It wanted to engage with provincial and municipal infrastructure and also with Outa and the Automobile Association. He said Sanral noted and welcomed Outa’s pronouncement that it had “no desire to see the demise of Sanral”.
“The adversarial relationship that has to date existed does not help anyone. We would rather our relationship with Outa and other civil society organisations were less adversarial and more about how to deliver road infrastructure to South Africans,” he said.
Mona rejected the call for the scrapping of the e-toll scheme, stressing this would mean Sanral would not be able to meet its financial obligations and may be liquidated. FINANCE Minister Pravin Gordhan yesterday urged mining companies in Africa to empower the youth and reskill their workers to counter the adverse effects of technology, while ensuring that they mined commodities sustainably.
Gordhan said technology in mining, especially the advent and subsequent takeover by robots and artificial intelligence, was threatening to wipe out at least 5 million jobs in the industry in the next few years.
He urged miners to provide “responsive and responsible leadership” in a bid to contribute to national development and ensure that they added value to their products.
Sustainability
“We are no longer in an environment where we can extract and export. I would argue that what we require is a very different kind of paradigm for mining in the 21st century.
“Sustainability is as important as the bottom line for companies,” Gordhan said.
“There should also be a great deal of examination of opportunities in Africa. This is the continent that is going to produce the new form of middle class.
“It is going to create a new centre of demand and future of global growth, very much like the kind of growth that China and India and others have created.”
Gordhan was speaking at law firm ENSAfrica’s VIP luncheon meeting with industry leaders on the sidelines of the 2017 Mining Indaba in Cape Town.
He said communities were now aware that globalisation had not benefited 99 percent of society, adding that a renewed social contract between the government, business, labour and society was needed to create “new forms of partnerships” to benefit the majority.
Gordhan said it was concerning that there were miners who were still implicated in acts of illicit financial flows, base erosion and tax avoidance, saying that mining companies had a greater responsibility to comply with government laws and regulations.
This is the continent that is going to produce the new form of middle class, centre of demand and future growth
He commended companies that were setting up empowerment funds to fill the junior-mining niche funding gap and opening up opportunities for young entrepreneurs to emerge and to create jobs.
Gordhan assured investors that South Africa was a good investment destination with a robust economic system, saying that 90 percent of the government’s R2 trillion debt was in rand terms and only 10 percent in foreign currency. – ANA