The taxi recapitalisation programme of the government exemplifies the attempt, and inevitable failure, of the project to modernise this sector. Under the combined class hegemony of transnational capital, the vehicle manufacturers winning the tender would have manufactured, supplied and maintained a fleet of 90 000 new vehicles.
The market would have been a captive one, the National Land Transport Transitional Act (2000) stipulates that only mini- and midi-buses would be allowed to operate as taxis. This whole project would have been underwritten by South African taxpayers to the tune of R4-billion.
The government tender stipulated that the new mini and midi-buses were to be diesel driven, because a surplus of diesel is produced in the local refining process.
It is clear that the original taxi recapitalisation programme has all the hallmarks of a top-down technocratic process in which a close collaboration between a managerialist political elite, big capital and emerging capital are assumed to be the best path to development and modernisation.
However well-intentioned, the programme was seriously flawed from the start. This attempt to bridge the “first” and “second” economy has now ended in predictable failure. It has failed for several reasons.
From the side of big capital, the dominant manufacturer in the South African market — Toyota — never even bothered to submit a tender. Perhaps this was because, knowing the market, it correctly appreciated that the proposal was unworkable, the dream of some public sector bureaucrats who produced specifications for two vehicles (an 18-seater and a 35-seater) that did not exist anywhere in the world. While 90 000 new vehicles was not, perhaps, an order to be sneezed at, it was also not an enormous market.
Those manufacturers who did tender — Tata, Iveco and GAZ, among others — were presumably seeking to gain a strategic foothold in the South African market, but they too, failed to produce affordable tenders.
In short, the assumption that government planners had the capacity to lead a market dominated by major transnationals proved to be misplaced.
Indeed, while the protracted (five-year) tender process was under way, market-driven recapitalisation was occurring, with long-distance operators out of Gauteng, for instance, purchasing without any government assistance an impressive new fleet of midi-buses.
The plan has also never enjoyed unreserved support from those who were intended to be the most immediate beneficiaries — the taxi-owners themselves. There are several dimensions to this. The technocratic nature of the programme required that the government should have a single, representative taxi-owner interlocutor.
And so, as an integral and logical part of the recap programme, there have been parallel processes of formalisation and democratisation of the sector. But the unease of a number of taxi owners and the sector-at-large should also be understood in the context of the class implications of the programme.
In effect, a successful implementation of the programme would have promoted a fraction of the owners, those able to afford the monthly repayments on new vehicles. The exact proportion of existing owners who would have succeeded in this respect was never known — partly because final tenders could never be negotiated down to reasonable prices, but also partly because no one had really done research into, among others, stratification and accumulation tendencies.
Those successfully promoted (making the trip from the “second” to the “first” economy — not now as drivers but as emerging formal sector capitalists) would, in effect however, have increased their dependence upon big capital — the finance houses, the vehicle manufacturers, and the banks and IT companies running the smart card float.
They would also have increased their dependence on the state (for subsidies and for protection from a significant number of operators who would fail to make the step up, and would now be “illegal” competitors).
For those owners able to make it into the programme, the government’s scrapping allowance was intended as a down payment on a new vehicle. For those taxi owners (numbers unknown) who would not be able to afford the new programme or who (as the official line went) “wanted to exit the system”, the scrapping allowance would have been, in effect, a retrenchment package.
The programme would also have had major implications for a much wider network of drivers, cleaners and backyard repair shops. For instance, part of the plan was to enforce maintenance contracts to be carried out by franchised formal sector dealerships. This would probably have destroyed thousands of jobs in backyard repair shops, while creating very few in the formal sector. It would have cut profit margins for the operators (repairs would now have to be done in regular working hours, instead of at weekends or through the night).
Again, because no research had been done into any of this, it is difficult to be sure of exact numbers of informal sector workers whose jobs may have been threatened.
In brief, taxi recapitalisation in its original (and now partially abandoned) form was a well-intentioned, but excessively technocratic initiative to improve the quality and reliability of this backbone of our public transport system.
And so it set about designing new vehicles and eliminating from the “market”, through regulation and affordability barriers, a significant proportion of existing operators.
Stepping back a little, it is possible to understand the illusions of the programme if we locate them within the broader paradigm of the reformist national democratic project.
Capitalist integration, formalisation and “modernisation” are assumed to be the answer to the challenges (the “legacy”) of underdevelopment. This modernising integration is conceptualised as a state-led technical and regulatory intervention that creates market space for capitalist corporations to drive the process.
At the political centre of the process is a cadre of state technocrats and emerging black/”patriotic” capitalists. In this latter respect, it is interesting to note that, although the notion of a national (or “patriotic”) bourgeoisie (usually simply equated with emerging black capital) is greatly in vogue, the actual impact of the original taxi recap programme would have been to increase the comprador and parasitic features of one of the few areas of organic black capital accumulation. The dominant class fraction in state power, with the best of intentions, was trying to remake the taxi owners in its own comprador parasitic image.
Where is the programme now? Faced with endless delays and mounting evidence of the unworkability of the programme in its original form, the government announced a review and scaling down last year — but continued to commit to a recap programme.
The scaling down now exists, essentially, in a regulatory framework that specifies certain basic safety and other features that will be required for an operating licence. This is a massively scaled-down and considerably more realistic version of the taxi redesign proposal. Gone are the “two-sizes” fits all approach, gone is the idea that wholly new taxis will be built, gone is the idea of a monopoly awarded to one or two manufacturers.
The scaled-down programme still includes a scrapping allowance (now of R50 000) as incentive to scrap old vehicles and to invest in new vehicles with the required regulatory design features. The programme will be rolled out by the national Department of Transport over several years, beginning with some pilot areas.
This is a huge improvement and eminently more practical. But it still preserves in shadow form some of the questionable assumptions of the original model. No thorough research has been done on the dynamic socio-economic features of the industry. We do not know what the programme’s impact will be.
In addition, although government’s public transport policy is (correctly) multi-modal, and stresses the need for seamless inter-modal public transport (non-motorised, taxis, buses and trains), we still have in the taxi recap programme a massive government subsidy that will be going to a single mode (one that has not received any subsidies historically, notwithstanding its market dominance). This might be just and more equitable, but an opportunity to use public funds to drive effective integration of modes is being lost. In short, the technical and top-down character of the recap programme still persists.
Is there an alternative? The transformation of the taxi industry has to be integrated not just into a more seamless multi-modal approach to transport, but into a much broader programme of building sustainable communities, towns and cities.
Taxi-sector transformation must be part of integrated spatial planning, where the developmental needs of workers and the poor are priorities. Much of what is thought of as a transport headache, and as a burden on public transport subsidies, may well be an accessibility challenge. In other words, the mobility problems of the poor may be best solved not through more motorised transport but by placing jobs, schools and public amenities within walking or cycling range.
This means that taxi-sector transformation cannot be a technocratic affair. It has to be driven by spatial planning, infrastructure development and democratic participation. The greater proportion of the current transport subsidies (rail, bus and eventually taxi) must be integrated modally but also, critically, devolved to the municipal level.
Jeremy Cronin is the South African Communist Party deputy general secretary and an ANC member of Parliament