The National Department of Transport began the Moving South Africa project in June 1997. The project encompassed a 14-month process to take the goals of the 1996 White Paper on National Transport Policy and develop a twenty-year strategy to achieve them.
| The Action Agenda is
available on line The Moving South Africa Draft Final Report is available online. The full report may also be downloaded in MS-Word format (zipped - 1.4 Mb) |
Moving South Africa kicked off in June of 1997 with a mandate to
"develop a strategy to ensure that the transportation system of South Africa meets the needs of South Africa in the 21st Century and therefore contributes to the country's growth and economic development."
The NDoT thus charged Moving South Africa with responsibility for helping to break new ground in government approaches to long-term strategic issues, and so MSA undertook to identify and clarify the nexus between policy and strategy. Since the White Paper had already put forth the vision, MSA's mission was to determine how to implement that vision in a way that would be consistent with the key thrusts articulated above - in an environment of limited resources, capacity and time.
The strategy should thus verify White Paper objectives on the basis of hard data, reconcile or choose amongst some of the sometimes competing objectives articulated in the White Paper, and create a context for action to achieve those objectives. The strategy does this by making difficult choices, based on data, about how to meet those objectives and by considering the delivery mechanisms by which those choices are translated into reality for government, customers, and service providers.
Although the strategy is based on 20-year forecasts, it must nevertheless set up systems and institutions that can read the signals coming from the international economic environment and respond to them in a coherent fashion within the context of the strategic vision. This vision, and the accompanying propagation of a transport 'doctrine', is what ultimately creates the durable connection between strategy as it is developed and actions as they are implemented. The strategic doctrine - based on a shared understanding of the data - provides a shared vision, clear choices, and consistent decision rules for all participants in the industry, including
The Moving South Africa Project has just wound up its activities, with the 7 September 1998 launch at Gallagher Estate, Midrand, of its Interim Consultative Report. After the conclusion of the consultative process a Final Report will be published, in both hard copy and on this site.