Moyiga Nduru
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 23 2006 (IPS) – South Africa is phasing out ageing and ill-maintained minibus taxis to pave the way for new, and hopefully safer, vehicles. Minibuses are a common means of transport in the country, where they serve between seven and nine million passengers a day, according to the Department of Transport.
Under our plan, 10,000 taxis will be scrapped by December 2006, Collin Msibi, a spokesman for the department, told IPS.
In all, 140,000 minibuses are to be taken off the roads within seven years, and replaced at an estimated cost of just over a billion dollars. The new vehicles will come in three sizes, with carrying capacities of nine, 17 and 35 passengers respectively according to transport minister Jeff Radebe.
We are on course, said Msibi. We believe that we are able to achieve the target.
But minibus operators say they need more time to get rid of their vehicles.
The timeframe is not realistic; we need at least ten years. They (government) want to do things in a short time. This is unfair, said Sicelo Mabaso, chairman of the National Taxi Alliance, based in the financial hub of Johannesburg.
It is good to have a dream, but it must be a realistic dream, he told IPS. You can t change Africa to look like Europe overnight Let s not run before we can crawl and walk.
Some 7,000 minibus owners marched in the capital, Pretoria, last month (May 26) to protest against the May 31 deadline for converting taxi permits to operating licences: a prerequisite for making the transition to the new vehicles.
However, speaking in the coastal city of Durban the same day, Redebe said 80 percent of owners had already applied to convert their permits. He urged the remaining 20 percent to do so immediately.
Radebe also noted that the new vehicles would be fitted with compulsory safety features to protect passengers, pedestrians and drivers.
Such claims leave Mabaso unimpressed.
You can have a vehicle with all the features in, and if the driver is unfit, he can kill people, he said. Coming up with fancy features will not solve the problem.
Minibus taxis are routinely involved in road accidents in South Africa, to the extent that they are sometimes labeled coffins on wheels , and mobile coffins . Many are unroadworthy, while overloading is common.
Under the minibus initiative, government will pay a once-off scrapping allowance of about 7,100 dollars to taxi owners who hand their vehicles in to authorities funds which can be used as the deposit on a new vehicle. Officials will impound those minibuses not delivered, and their owners may lose out on the allowance.
Change is also needed in other respects to make taxi use easier and safer.
In cities there are designated lanes for buses, but there are no lanes for taxis; yet buses carry only a few passengers Various studies show that taxis carry more than 65 percent of passengers a day, said Mabaso.
Taxis still pick passengers up from the road sides. The municipality has not made provision for taxis to pick up passengers as they have done for buses, he added.
Taxis are individually owned with no support from outside; the government utilises resources for buses. Our government inherited this from the previous (apartheid) regime. It is 11 years now (since the advent of democracy); this should have been rectified.
Msibi believes that improving the state of minibus taxis will play a key role in putting them on a par with other methods of transport.
You cannot integrate something which is not up to scratch. If upgraded, the taxis will compete with other modes of transport like buses and trains.
For commuters, progress in the transport sector cannot come a moment too soon.
They (new taxis) will definitely uplift the face of our cities, coming as they do at a time when South Africa is preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2010, says Morongwa Khwene, who works for a supermarket chain in Randburg, Johannesburg.
But the drivers should be retrained to avoid reckless driving.
