South Africa’s transport system is becoming increasingly inadequate in responding to export-led growth, Transport Minister Jeff Radebe said on Monday.
Speaking at the South African Transport Conference in Pretoria, Radebe said road networks were congested and ”bursting at the seams”.
A resource not fully used was sea transport.
”The government has not made the correct policy response to the usage of one of our under-utilised endowments, our ocean, for coastal shipping.”
He said recommendations were eagerly awaited from maritime experts as to how the government could harness and efficiently ”massify” the use of this resource for short sea transportation.
Radebe said the skills to respond to policy implementations were severely depleted.
”A number of reasons account for this skills depletion — the brain drain, our previous education inequalities, the global mobility of the workforce, job-hopping and high turnover rate of public officials,” he said. — Sapa