President Thabo Mbeki recently warned that the government’s R7,7billion taxi recapitalisation plan will not be held to ransom by the taxi industry. However, the National Taxi Alliance (NTA), a major player in the industry, remains vehemently opposed to the idea. Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya spoke to NTA chair Sicelo Mabaso to hear how the alliance plans to handle government’s tough talk.
The president has thrown down the gauntlet. How are you going to respond?
We respect the president and know he has a country to run. It is unfortunate that in many cases he has to depend on his ministers and has been left exposed because he listened to them.
Is that a wrong conclusion?
When [Transport Minister] Jeff Radebe came into office in 2004, we congratulated him. In no time he revised the taxi recapitalisation plan. We responded in writing saying that it now looked like it was implementable.
We met with him and raised our concerns and he agreed with us. Unfortunately, he decided to make a U-turn and started to go ahead with the recapitalisation with all its problems unaddressed, just because Santaco [South African National Taxi Council] were saying yes to everything.
What are these problems and concerns?
Legislation, passenger safety and affordability. Government is saying that every taxi operator must have an operating permit. We are saying that because of government’s moratorium on operating permits [from 1997], the majority of people are operating illegally through no fault of their own.
Why is it not their fault?
The moratorium does not take into account new settlements and individual growth. If you worked hard and you had one taxi in 1997, but now have more than one, the other taxis are operating illegally. It also means that new taxis on new routes are also operating illegally.
If the problems are this obvious, why do you think government has gone ahead with its plan?
I don’t want to say that government officials are naive, but they are playing with people’s emotions. They say we are not interested in safety.
But, at the end of the day, the people will be the users of these expensive vehicles [the cheapest being about R250Â 000]. They will have to pay for them. Our passengers are not ATMs. Their salaries are the lowest. We don’t think our commuters are ready to pay double or triple the fare. We are actually fighting their war.
Why do you think Santaco is indifferent to these concerns?
It is very simple. You need to promote the image of your employer. They are paid salaries and housed by government. They don’t know how much their rent is [and] there is no way that you can bite the hand that feeds you.
What is it you are suspicious of?
We think that government wants to get rid of the taxi industry and replace it with something else. We don’t think they intend improving the taxi industry. We don’t know what kind of BEE they are talking about when they want to destroy the only industry that is controlled by black people. They want us to integrate into Santaco when Santaco has nothing.
Is it not true that your organisation was a founder member of Santaco and government says you guys withdrew when you were not elected to its leadership?
The NTA was founded in 1999. Santaco was born in 2001. There were two bodies, Santaco and NTA. Santaco chose to become a government sounding box instead of representing the aspirations of the taxi industry.
[Late former transport minister] Dullah Omar felt there was a need to unify the taxi industry and started negotiating with NTA and Santaco. We all bought into the idea of unifying the taxi industry, but didn’t say this would be the end of the NTA.
Towards the first [unity] conference, we picked up that government’s agenda was to swallow NTA into Santaco. We decided to pull out.
But your members stood for elections.
I sacrificed myself so as not to embarrass the minister. We did not want people thinking that we ran away from a democratic process. I thought I was compromising myself, but it turns out that I compromised NTA as a whole because today we are seen as having taken part in that process and we are now unhappy because we didn’t win.
If you were minister of transport, what would you do differently?
We would talk to the manufacturers, the operators and the financial institutions. We wouldn’t say, like the government says, ‘we don’t talk to you unless you belong to the same church as usâ€. In the Constitution there is freedom of association and of disassociation. There is freedom of expression.
Listening to President Mbeki, it seems that there is no turning back. Where to from here?
His statements are nothing but intimidation. We will not be intimidated. We think we have a good cause to fight. We will go to court. We say [recapitalisation] must be stopped in order to be fine-tuned.