The violence-torn taxi industry is slowly changing, reports guest writer Pippa Green
Dipak Patel had waited half a year for this meeting. He’d sent messages, he’d made phone calls. No response. Finally a message came back: ”Why do you want to talk to me?” Another message, more conversations with go-betweens, then the instruction: drive your car to such-and-such a place.
The former Umkhonto weSizwe cadre did as instructed. He was met by three men armed with automatic weapons. They blindfolded him and drove him to the meeting place. He was not invited to sit down. There were few courtesies. The armed men didn’t leave his side.
Now face to face with one of the most powerful men in the taxi business, Patel kept silent. ”He lectured me,” recalls Patel. ”Asked me what I thought I was doing.”
”Do you know who the two most important men in the country are?” asked his taciturn host. ”The president is one of them. The other is me.”
Patel is now a chief director in Mac Maharaj’s Department of Transport. He tells me about the meeting on condition I don’t name the taxi boss, or even the province where the meeting took place. In Gauteng, in discussions with taxi association bosses, the theme is the same: ”Don’t say I said that.” ”Don’t say I told you this.” ”Don’t say you saw me here.” ”Let’s not talk about those people now. Anyway, they’re deceased.”
Unlike his Pretoria predecessors, Patel routinely relies on his political skills and his experience as an underground operative. For 18 months, he has chaired the National Taxi Task Team, the ”N triple T”, the taxi bosses call it, in this land that loves acronyms, although sometimes they mistakenly call it the ”N triple three”, as if it were some grand highway. The taxi industry from each province assigned representatives to the body. It took Patel about six months to figure out that some representatives had no power in their own ranks.
When he began trying to see the real bosses, such as the important man at the secret venue, he was told to mind his nose or watch his back.
Instead Patel patiently counted his steps around the country, to the doors of the taxi associations, persuading them that the central recommendation of the NTTT, which is that taxi associations and operators should register, would be good for business. It is a task that has called for courage and political sleuth that was unlikely to have taxed his predecessors in the transport bureaucracy much.
Currently, there are about 150 000 kombi taxis in the country. Perhaps 70 000 people — maybe fewer — own them, and 30 000 others lease them — collectively they are known in the business as ”operators”. At least half the taxis on the road are illegal. ”We’re faced with the problem of how to integrate taxis into a public transport plan.” says Patel. ”The leverage which the government has over the industry is minimal. We have to resolve systematically the immediate mess in the taxi industry through a combination of incentives and economic assistance if they register.”
The deadline for registration in Gauteng is February 28. Now Patel is dashing around the province, from rank to rank, office to office, to make sure that registration is on track. It’s unrealistic, he says, to expect access to taxi operators unless you go through the associations. He knows what their role in the taxi violence has been. ”But basically anyone in this business who has survived for more than a decade has dirty hands,” he says.
Late last year, Nelson Mandela lost patience with the taxi bosses. He phoned Maharaj, asked him to bring his ”boy” from the taxi task team and come down to the ranks. Now.
With no fanfare, no announcement, no press statement, the president, the minister and the task team chair hit the Baragwanath rank in Soweto and the Noord Street rank in central Johannesburg. It was days after a drive-by shooting in Johannesburg, and weeks after several taxis were set alight at the Bara rank. Mandela was angry.
What had the task team being doing? But at the taxi ranks, association bosses greeted Patel. They knew about registration. Clearly someone had been working.
A few days later, Mandela called a meeting in Pretoria of the taxi association bosses. His fellow most-important citizen didn’t pitch (”The big bosses never come,” explains Patel), but his second-in-command and third-in-command were there.
”I cannot tolerate you killing one another,” said Mandela. ”The minister here is very generous, talking about development, and I have been saying to him that if this killing does not stop I am going to take very drastic action.”
Three times Mandela threatened to close down the taxi ranks if the killing did not stop. Then, politic as always, he raised the question of registration, the lesser evil. ”You cannot avoid registration, that you must understand.”
The taxi men asked questions, politely phrased but aggressive in their content.
We are prepared to register, says one, but we don’t know where to go. Also, the transport department has failed us in not providing training workshops about registration. Another asks: ”But aren’t you leading us to the taxman? We don’t want to be taxed for what we don’t know what for.”
Mandela can scarcely believe his ears. These men are all equipped with cellphones and many have arrived in luxury cars. He sits at the table, grim-faced, taking notes, and begins his reply with a gentle buzz: ”Whatever I say does not question your integrity. I take it for granted that you are asking genuine questions …” Then the sting: ”You say you want to be registered but you need a lot of workshopping. I don’t accept that as an excuse at all. You buy cars, you know where to go, you license those taxis, you know where to go, why don’t you know where to go to register?”
And as for tax: ”All of us pay tax. And let me tell you that when we came into power we inherited a system where the president did not pay tax. I thought that was immoral so I offered to pay tax and I pay tax. Why should you not pay tax?”
In full stride, he turns to road safety. It’s something the government has been trying to tackle. Patel swears he’s seen a taxi with a monkey-wrench where the steering wheel should be.
”Before I went to jail,” says Mandela, ”I took a taxi from Orlando to town and there were three chaps — young fellows — sitting in front and one of them was driving. Here was the steering wheel … he was looking this side,” says the President turning his head at right-angles to his outstretched arms. ”And with one hand. And he was extremely fast. So I said, ‘Why do you drive like this?’ and he said ‘Toppie’. And I said ‘Ai, toppie’ ”.
The laughter has now changed from nervous peals to guffaws. ”In those days I was still much younger than I now am, but to them I was a ‘toppie’. But I was sure that I was not going to reach town.”
Duma Nkosi is still never sure whether he’s going to reach town. He doesn’t often take a taxi to town, although he owns 10, which do the dangerous run between KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg. ”Our life is like that,” he says rubbing an imaginary speck of dust between his thumb and forefinger. ”If you come to work in the morning, you don’t know whether you’ll come back home. If you go home, you don’t know whether you’ll come to work.”
Nkosi is the vice-president of the Sizwe Taxi Association, an affiliate of the South African Long Distance Taxi Association (Salta). His office is a small room in a petrol station, light on furniture but heavy with pink blinds. It faces onto the busy Noord Street taxi rank in downtown Johannesburg. The front of the office is entirely of glass, perhaps an unwise design choice as one of the windows has already been cracked into neat concentric ripples by a bullet.
A few months ago, eight taxis were set alight in this rank, says Nkosi. A few weeks ago, a man was shot dead here. ”The same week we saw people running and just heard shooting. Then our security ran away and said they can’t work here.” And the window, I ask. Nkosi smiles sheepishly. ”No, people were drinking here and there was an accident. It was not that type of shooting.”
Last week, Patel visited the rank to discuss another of the of the NTTT’s proposals — that a concrete cover be constructed on top of the station to become a new long-distance taxi rank.
The R25-million development is due to start next month. It will get taxis off the congested streets around the station, and provide more centralised security. Its success depends crucially on all the taxi associations agreeing to it, and registering so that the government can cater for the number of long-distance taxis that converge weekly in Johannesburg.
Today Paulus Nene, the chair of the Sizwe Taxi Association, has promised to take Patel around those parts of the rank he feels are safe for him.
”Have you registered yet?” is Patel’s first question, and there’s much laughter, shuffling of feet and talk of ”we’re waiting for the mother body”.
The mother-bodies are the bane of Patel’s life. These are the bodies to which individual associations affiliate. In the case of the long-distance taxis that use this rank, the mother-body is Salta.
The rival mother body is the Lethlabile Taxi Association. The bosses of the mother bodies probably don’t need any economic incentives to register. Most don’t even own taxis. But the mother-bodies — there are eight national bodies as well as about three or four in each province — administer ranks, control the competition and provide protection for their affiliate associations.
If the individual associations and operators register, it could take away a large part of their raison d’tre. The head of one mother body reportedly has R3- million in his current account and pulls in a cool R60 000 a month from affiliates’ fees.
It seems almost nothing can touch him. Charged with seven murders in Johannesburg, he had his case mysteriously transferred to Pietersburg, where he was released on R5 000 bail. Already one witness has been killed and another two are missing.
But for the lowlier members of associations, such as Nkosi, there is some sense in the government holding out the carrot of economic incentives to register. At least the security might be better, he thinks. Right now his association pays a private security company (the second one, after the first fled) R28 000 a month to patrol the rank with lethal-looking, but rather old-fashioned weapons.
The security guards walk the 20m of the safe territory on the rank with Nene and Nkosi. They shove their rifles into passengers’ chests, pushing them away. No one — not even women with small children — is allowed to share this patch of pavement with the taxi bosses. There is not a police officer in sight.
Sizwe’s kombi drivers don’t dare take the N3 to KwaZulu-Natal alone. Three taxis go in convoy. But still, one has been hijacked in recent weeks, and another shot at.
Traffic fines are another major overhead. Of Duma Nkosi’s 10 taxis, only three have permits. He says he has paid more than R10 000 in traffic fines in the past few years.
But the demands from a dependent market on the peripheries of the city have made the risk worthwhile. And if bus services were inadequate from the townships there were none at all from the informal settlements. So the taxi business arose in response to these gaps.
Sometimes the response was more specific.
Malofe Rapudile of the East Gauteng Taxi Association began his business in 1987 when the South African Railways workers went on a prolonged strike and their township compatriots boycotted the trains.
He ferried commuters between Germiston and Johannesburg. Since then, he says, he has paid ”thousands and thousands in fines … If you can’t pay you get locked.”
Stamping out the taxi industry was official government policy, a way of getting a market edge for their bus and rail services.
Rapudile is ”very happy” that legalisation is part of the registration deal. Any taxi-owner who can prove he’s been operating since before October 1994 will get a permit — part of a deal to keep out newcomers.
And on the East Rand, and in the Vaal association in Vereeniging, the taxi associations are talking real business: spare-parts cooperatives, take-away franchises at the ranks and partnership- owned filling stations.
In Vereeniging the taxi offices smell of furniture polish. There are no bullet holes. Several associations and their members have already registered. The taxi rank is no litter-strewn, Gotham-city like jumble. Rows of taxis park under carport shade, and each destination is marked, reducing commuters’ dependence on often bad-mannered ”queue marshals” who bark orders to them in places like Soweto.
Here the associations are beginning to see a bigger future. Patel talks to them about the way apartheid planned its cities. Cities can change, he says. Now you usually run back empty. If we bring the city inside itself, you can use your taxis more efficiently.
Next time anyone asks Maharaj what he’s doing about the taxi violence, he should take them to Vereeniging. Or to Germiston, where associations have not only registered but united into a forum. Its chair, Jabulani Mtshali, says: ”The most important part of registration is that the individual will be formalised and then the violence will be less.”
For Patel, it is classic political strategy. The dictum- although they don’t put it this way in Pretoria — is to take the lieutenants with you and isolate the generals. Those who continue to resist registration, threatens Patel, will be dealt with once their colleagues have registered. ”We need to take them out of the industry and out of circulation.”
Perhaps then, carving out a niche in the market can be done without the use of armed men.
Pippa Green is SABC radio’s political editor