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JEREMY MAGGS: In Cape Town, taxi operators have been protesting since Thursday with the torching of buses and city resources. Police also confirming overnight that three people have now been killed in separate incidents in and around Cape Town International Airport. All of this is related to the strike and the violence. Provincial Premier Alan Winde starts our programme and is with me now. So overnight, Premier, the Western Cape High Court has granted another interdict against Santaco [South African National Taxi Council]. Is this helping in any way?
ALAN WINDE: I presume so. Yesterday Santaco also came out publicly, which we did value because they hadn’t been doing it earlier, to say that they are calling for calm. Obviously, their actions sparked their own members, but also, I think other people in getting involved in illegal activity, unrest and resulting in three people losing their lives.
It has been a lot calmer overnight, and even this morning, sporadic small uprisings and protest but not directly linked to the taxi industry.
So definitely today, much calmer than yesterday.
JEREMY MAGGS: Two or three days ago, there were so-called no-go zones in the province. Has that also dissipated?
ALAN WINDE: Okay, so it depends. The no-go zones still apply to Golden Arrow buses and still apply to the MyCiTi buses. So there are parts of the city of Cape Town that they don’t go into at the moment; Dunoon, Nyanga, Khayelitsha and Joe Slovo are areas that the buses actually stop outside, and unfortunately, citizens have to then walk from there. So those are still seen as no-go. But all peaceful at the moment and hopefully that also starts to open up a bit more. But the strike is still on. It has not ended yet.
JEREMY MAGGS: Given that things are a little bit more temperate, do you think there’s any room now for negotiation?
ALAN WINDE: Well, I think it’s been very clear that you can’t negotiate with a gun held to your head. There’s got to be the city, the province in the room. It has been said since Friday, if we can see peace, we’re happy to negotiate and hopefully today we can start to put that back on the table to say we see it’s much calmer, I’m sure we can get to some area of negotiation.
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Obviously, still holding the line that consequences for anybody who was involved in the illegal activity has to continue. There were a number of arrests yesterday, impounding of vehicles yesterday that were blocking roads and a lot of cases and charges laid, and of course, those need to continue. We can’t negotiate around those issues.
But the issues around what we would like to achieve, I think we are down to a couple of points that we have to have a discussion on. That was the whole reason of the task team, and I sincerely hope that we get back into that task team and enable a discussion that finds where taxi drivers and owners can see that there are systems in place for safety and looking after citizens’ rights. Because of course, that’s what our job is to do, is to make sure that a public transport system offers an effective, but a safe mechanism for people to get from A to B.
JEREMY MAGGS: What are those principal sticking points right now?
ALAN WINDE: So at the moment, it is around what are the requirements that enable impoundment. So there are clear areas, if you don’t have a licence, if you don’t have a professional driving permit [PDP] licence, if your vehicle is unroadworthy, your vehicle will be impounded.
But if there is an area, perhaps say drunken driving, that that driver should be arrested and the vehicle not impounded, and those are the kinds of areas where there’s a discussion to say which enables an impoundment or not. There’s a whole range of them from drunken driving to driving over yellow lines and through red traffic lights and so on. So those are the discussions.
Of course, we need to make sure that there are strict rules for public transport because it’s about the citizen, the commuter.
JEREMY MAGGS: The big issue that you’ve still got to get around, surely though, is the disconnect between the industry and the provincial and city authorities. Santaco, and this emerged in the court application, believes the city doesn’t recognise the industry as a business and that it’s providing valuable public transport in areas where the city government is simply failing to do so.
ALAN WINDE: Ja, I don’t know if I’d agree with that. They’re a very serious component in our public transport sector. But of course, the illegal operators and there are people that do not legally fit in the system and also are criminals, and that’s where the blurring line comes. But the minibus taxi system, a million people a day in the city get transported through the system of minibus taxis. It is a very, very important part of public transport.
But of course, it’s also got to be an integrated part, and that’s also where there’s a lot of disagreement. It’s always in the taxis’ interest for the trains not to operate. We need to make sure that taxis, trains, metered taxis, buses are all seen as components of a public transport system that work interdependently and work well together.
Read: MyCiTi the focus of Cape Town’s new public transport plan
It can’t be a fight over who gets the share of the market, and the market is growing very fast. So it’s not as if anybody’s going be put out, we’ve got to make sure that we enable the public transport sector to work in unison as the city grows, and it is growing very fast at the moment, and it is critical that we get that right.
JEREMY MAGGS: But that’s the fundamental challenge because the taxi industry isn’t actually public transport. They are private operators working within the public system, and they are businesses, and a lot of this has got to do with the fact that we have deficiency in public transport, not just in the Western Cape, but around the country.
ALAN WINDE: Absolutely and it’s how do we get that to work together. We ran a pilot project in the province where, because they keep on saying there’s subsidy to buses, there’s subsidy in the train system, but there’s nothing in a taxi system. So we ran a pilot, it’s called the Blue Dot, where all the taxis in the pilot had microchips in them so they could be tracked if they were on route or off route, what speed they were traveling at and so on. The owners could track the vehicles and how they were operating.
There was a range of complaints that citizens could make, that would be a demerit system, they would not get the subsidy if commuters or other road users were complaining against that taxi. So it was a behaviour change system, and I think it worked very well.
Unfortunately, the province is not in a position to actually put the billions aside that it would cost as a major subsidy for everybody.
The pilot worked; we’ve got to actually convince national government that this is a programme that could work. There’s talk about it.
I do believe that is one of the routes to go that you bind people in because, of course, the illegality on the other side is that you there’s always the accusation that people in one component, like the taxi industry, are enabling the destruction of trains so that they keep their business going and we can’t have that. We’ve got to have people working together. They’ve got to be a business that is a responsible business and, of course, also a profitable business that’s offering a great service.
JEREMY MAGGS: Just finally, are you able at this point, to quantify the cost of the strike so far to the economy?
ALAN WINDE: No, not yet. Of course, the economy is a big part. There have been three lives lost directly attributed to the strike, and then a lot of infrastructure damage, right down to one of our clinics last night, partially burnt, and of course reaching back to buses, vehicles, some looting taking place as well. Then the main economic impact, which is going be substantial.
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Then, of course, there’s the other impact, which is to general services and education. 40% of learners in our school system not able to be at school. That also long-term has a big impact. We’ve been trying to catch up with the losses of Covid-19, running Saturday schools and really working hard to catch up and now that’s also been set back. So I don’t have the full quantum, all I know is it would be substantial.
JEREMY MAGGS: Premier Alan Winde, thank you very much indeed.
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