Cape Town | Thursday
MORE than 33 000 accidents involving government garage vehicles cost taxpayers about R93-million in repairs and replacement bills over the past five years, figures tabled in Parliament on Thursday showed.
Information contained in a written reply by Transport Minister Dullah Omar to a parliamentary question revealed that a total of 432 government cars were stolen over the same period.
The reply to a question from Stuart Farrow (DA) says the figures were provided to the minister by the nine provincial authorities, each of which is responsible for the management of the garage facilities located in their region.
The five-year period the provinces reported on runs from 1997/98 to the 2001/02 financial year.
The highest repair bill was incurred by Gauteng about R25-million although the province that managed to damage the highest number of vehicles was the Western Cape, which reported 6 197 incidents.
Paradoxically, the Western Cape reported the second-lowest stolen car figure, a total of 42 over the five years. This province only had two vehicles taken during the 2001/02 financial year.
Second and third highest in terms of number of accidents were Gauteng (5618) and the Eastern Cape (5271) respectively.
The reply did not give the relative sizes of the vehicle pools operated by the government garages in each of the provinces.
However, according to the ministry’s motor transport manager, Nashee Sewpersadh, the current pool sizes for each province are: Eastern Cape: 3 933; North West: 2 405; Northern Province: 4 611; KwaZulu-Natal: 4 472; Western Cape: 4 008; Mpumalanga: 2 313; Gauteng: 5 691; Free State: 1 909; and, Northern Cape: 776.
The total number of vehicles is 30118.
Sewpersadh said that only one province, Northern Cape, had privatised the running of its government car pool.
According to the reply, this province has the lowest number of vehicles stolen (25) over the five-year period.
Sewpersadh said four other provinces were at various stages of investigating whether or not they should ”outsource” the function, while the remaining four had decided against this. – Sapa