Norman Reynolds: A SECOND LOOK
Public anger about the violence involved in the taxi wars is intensifying. In township after township people have met and marched, but to no avail: citizens remain the victims of an unfair, dangerous and badly organised industry.
The government has promised to reform the “taxi industry”. It is trying to gain some control through the registration of taxis and by enforcing routes. So far there is little evidence that these efforts are working.
In Johannesburg senior officials talk of having legitimised the illegitimate, and of how much harder it is to deal with the taxi associations. Now the army is being dragged in to work with the police in troubled townships.
The government has failed to understand the problem. It is not one of regulation.
The taxi industry was born during the struggle for the right to run black business. When it first began, it was illegal. It grew by gaining the illegal collaboration of corrupt policemen and of ruthless investors, many of them white.
It is still affected by its history. No amount of regulation or iron-fist policing will change this or its consequences. Black taxis will not provide a proper service and their owners will not be at peace until the industry is restructured.
Huge profits were made in the beginning. As the number of taxis grew, so profits fell. Today there are too many taxis. Owners resort to ruthless tactics in their efforts to stay in business.
Strangely, although apartheid is supposed to be dead, taxis still serve the old system. They carry economically and physically isolated township people to work in the cities. These are survival, not economic, trips. There is a limit to what “apartheid” workers can pay.
The history of illegal operation with crooked owners and corrupt police has led to the taxi industry being organised into territories in the same way that gangs cut up the town and rule by fear over the bits of turf they claim.
Because taxis are mobile, competition for turf involves routes. Different taxi groups try to strong-arm each other off these routes. Taxi wars over territory erupt without warning.
Over-trading, a real ceiling to fare prices and fierce competition around territory, prevent the ruling gangster mentality from seeing people as customers. Passengers are just chips in the game, helpless victims to be bullied and frightened into doing what best suits the taxi owners.
In trying to “organise” the taxi owners, the government has little chance of success. It is trying to “organise” the wrong party. The owners and taxi associations are anarchic bodies. Even if they submit to regulation, will the result be effective, efficient and fair?
Almost certainly, the result will still be territorial units now enjoying monopolies endorsed by the government. Travellers will not have choice, and they will still have to suffer the unfair practice of transferring between taxi associations, alias monopolistic territories.
Many township residents are compelled to take four or even eight taxis every day on regular routes to work and back. “Successful” regulation would legally entrench this time-wasting and money-wasting imposition.
In defining its approach to taxi violence, the government should go back to the Constitution. It should start by asking: “What are the rights of the public, of the fare-paying traveller?” The government must realise it must start not by helping the taxis to organise, but by helping the citizens, the taxi users, to become “organised”.
Ordinary citizens “whose rights have been adversely affected by administrative action” enjoy, under Section 33 of the Constitution, which guarantees “administrative justice”, the right to seek court action. The court can review administrative action, impose a duty on the state to give effect to constitutional aims and generally promote an efficient administration.
Section 33, perhaps the most interesting in the Constitution, has yet to be invoked. Hopefully that day is nigh. There are community-based bodies which wish to pass resolutions asking the Legal Resources Centre and similar public-interest bodies to use Section 33 on their behalf to establish “administrative justice” in the instance of taxis.
The principle to be secured is that the paying traveller has the right to the “social ownership” of the route he freely chooses to travel. No taxi or bus operator can “own” a route – only travellers can. Whether we walk, ride a bicycle, drive a car or pay to travel in a taxi or bus, we, as citizens, “own” the routes we choose to travel.
The government, transitional councils and community groups should reform the industry from this premise of route ownership by the travelling public. I believe the issue can be brought before the courts as a public-interest case.
Before that happens, the R70-million the minister of transport has provided to organise the taxi industry should be made available to citizens so that they, their councils and regional businesses can set up their own community transport companies. This is not a far-fetched idea. The Brazilian city of Curitiba closed down 110 gun-fighting bus companies in this way.
This is how it works: citizens, working with their councils or other accepted bodies, use state money to organise a community transport company. They appoint suitable directors and management. The company then invites taxi and bus operators to put in tenders to provide service along certain routes under specified conditions which the community defines.
The company pays those who successfully tendered an agreed amount per kilometre for each route. The operator collects from the passengers the fee which the company sets. The company does not have to own taxis or buses. It manages the relationship between passengers and transport providers on behalf of its members, who are the passengers.
The company lays down safety, comfort, frequency, maintenance and other standards. It chooses the type of taxi or bus which best suits a route, and it supervises to make sure that the agreed criteria and conditions are followed.
Passengers participate in the process. Every member/passenger has a personal interest in the company’s performance and is an inspector. Poor service providers are fired – their contracts are terminated.
If they are smart, the existing taxi associations can continue to operate. But they will face competition; competition which ignores territorial boundaries, which runs services from home to work and back without artificial taxi stops and transfers, which is safe and which answers to the community.
Norman Reynolds is chair of the South African Market Association