The road transportation business in Southern Africa is fraught with obstacles, in the shape of Aids and crime. However, industry players say it is also providing opportunities for promoting black empowerment.
This term, predominantly used in South Africa, refers to efforts at increasing the extent to which blacks own and manage the country’s economic resources. It is an attempt to overcome the legacy of apartheid, which largely excluded blacks from taking a lead in the economy.
”There are lots of small businesses that fail, but there are a number that are persisting and prospering. I have an established business, and I regularly contract out to black empowerment companies that I find reliable,” says Willie Stuart, owner of Speedy Overboarder Services in Swaziland.
But Stuart warns that it is a risky profession characterised by trucks getting hijacked at gunpoint, and a high incidence of HIV infection among workers.
”There is nothing sadder than seeing a retired person use all his pension to buy a truck, thinking there is nothing simpler than hauling goods. But because of truck hijacking in South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia, the insurance on vehicles alone can break you,” he says.
Musa Hlope, recent president of the Swaziland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, agrees.
”You have to know the business. So many trucking firms were started by people from [other] professions. They fail.”
The inspection and taxation of goods at national borders also catches inexperienced operators unawares. These inspections can result in costly delays if an operator is unfamiliar with procedure.
”I felt like expanding into Zambia, but when I went to their border to see the customs inspectors tearing into shipments and causing delays, I said ‘Forget it’,” noted the manager of a trucking firm based in the South African port city of Durban.
”When schedules aren’t kept, customers lose money because they don’t receive parts and stock. To retain business, we have to refund shipping costs,” he adds.
Sharp Freight is a black empowerment success story. Its founders cut their teeth at a large international trucking firm, Manica -‒ which subsequently became one of the casualties of the transportation sector.
Out of Manica’s demise in Swaziland, Shadrack Mnisi and his partners created their own firm that plies the South African and Swazi highways.
”We are security-conscious. We have a new secure warehouse, and our trucks travel in convoys to avoid hijackings,” says Mnisi.
Stuart gives his drivers mobile phones, with orders to call in every half-hour. Clients with big shipments are given the drivers’ phone numbers to keep track of their goods’ whereabouts. Some companies have also erased their corporate logos from the sides of vehicles, so that bandits won’t know which goods the trucks are transporting.
Charles Khumalo, an independent trucker who drives the new highway connecting the South African province of Gauteng, where Johannesburg and Pretoria are located, to Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, says he has lost a lot of colleagues to Aids.
”I’ve seen companies fail because they’ve run out of drivers. Not [everyone] can drive a big rig truck. It takes training and practice. A lot of experienced drivers are dying,” he says.
Wendy Nxumalo, an Aids counsellor in the north-eastern South African town of Nelspruit, says: ”Truckers are the sailors of today, with a girl in every port.
”They sleep in their trucks, and every starving girl knows she can get a meal in exchange for sex with a trucker. Every time I see one of these big rig trucks, I hand the driver a packet of condoms.”
Swaziland’s Ministry of Transportation has now stepped in to promote Aids awareness among truckers -‒ this after Aids was recognised not only as a public health crisis, but also a threat to regional economies.
Evart Madelia, principal secretary at the ministry, says: ”Swaziland is a landlocked country, and all of our fuel and just about all of our consumer goods and other needs have to be brought in by road or rail.
”A shortage of truck drivers will hurt the economy. There will be shortages in shops, and factories couldn’t get spare parts and raw materials for manufacturing.”
The toll that Aids is taking on the trucking community is also visible along the Beira corridor, a 100km-long stretch of road and rail connections that aims to link the Southern African interior with the port of Beira in Mozambique.
The Mozambican part of the corridor is said to have one of the highest incidences of Aids in the country, because of the large number of itinerant persons using the road and rail system, including truckers.
Population Services International, a non-profit group based in Washington, is completing the first year of a programme called Corridors of Hope, which focuses on truckers and commercial sex workers.
The programme acknowledges the extent to which truckers make use of these workers when they are away from their normal partners for great lengths of time.
”Long-distance truckers, bus drivers and taxi drivers have fallen through the cracks in previous Aids programmes, and they now occupy the ‘high risk’ category in health studies,” says Hlobise Ndlovu, marketing and communications manager for Population Services International.
The Corridors of Hope programme has taken the unusual step of hiring sex workers as ”peer educators”.
The Family Life Association of Swaziland (Flas) instructs the women in the basics of Aids. They learn the life-saving benefits of condom use for themselves and their clients.
Jerome Shongwe, the Corridors of Hope programme director at Flas, says: ”We started with 10 peer educators at Lomahasha, Swaziland’s southern border post with South Africa. The greatest number, 20, work at Oshoek, the border post most frequented by truck traffic from the Johannesburg-Pretoria region.”
The campaign is financed by the United States Agency for International Development.
Corridors of Hope would no doubt be applauded by Charles Khumalo.
”They are always developing technology to make road transport safer and faster, and protect us from hijackers. But more attention must be given to the man behind the wheel,” he says. — IPS