South Africa cannot afford to take the taxi industry for granted - IOL

South Africa’s taxi industry is indispensable to millions of commuters, but its importance must be matched by greater safety, accountability and professionalism.

As we kick off Transport Month, it is worth acknowledging a simple reality that is sometimes lost in the political and policy debates about public transport: millions of South Africans depend on minibus taxis to get to work, school, shops and healthcare facilities every day.

The importance of this industry is most brutally demonstrated when taxi services are withdrawn.

When taxi operators embark on a stayaway, entire communities can be brought to a standstill. Workers cannot get to factories, offices and shops. Learners struggle to get to school. Small businesses lose customers and employees. Hospitals and other essential services are affected.

That dependence tells us something important.

Whatever our frustrations with the taxi industry, South Africa cannot treat it as a peripheral player in the transport system. Government itself has described the minibus taxi industry as the country's largest public transport mode, with an estimated 15 million commuters using it daily.

The story of the taxi industry is, in many ways, a mirror of South Africa's social and economic transformation.

Under apartheid, black South Africans faced severe restrictions on economic participation and mobility. Communities that were cut off from formal transport networks often had to rely on privately operated sedan taxis to get around. Minibus taxis later emerged as an important response to the inadequate public transport services available to these communities, eventually becoming a major part of the country’s transport system.

By the 1980s, deregulation helped unleash a rapid expansion of black-owned taxi businesses. Government's own historical accounts acknowledge that the sector became one of the few avenues through which black South Africans could build wealth and businesses at a time when opportunities were severely constrained.

But deregulation was both an opportunity and a curse.

It opened the market to thousands of operators, but inadequate regulation and intense competition over routes and passengers contributed to the emergence of taxi associations and violent turf wars. The industry developed its own structures of organisation and enforcement, sometimes outside the effective reach of the state.

Democracy did not erase that history.

Instead, the new government inherited an industry that was simultaneously indispensable, entrepreneurial, fragmented and difficult to regulate.

This is why we should be careful about the language we use. Minibus taxis perform a public transport function, but they are privately owned businesses. They are not the same as state-owned or municipally operated bus systems. Government's own transport documents have acknowledged that minibus taxis historically received no direct operational subsidy, although the Taxi Recapitalisation Programme provides capital support through the scrapping of old vehicles.

That distinction matters because taxi operators are expected to provide a public service while carrying the financial risks of running private businesses.

In 2006, government introduced the Taxi Recapitalisation Programme, with safety and fleet renewal at its core. The programme was intended to remove old, unsafe vehicles from the roads and help operators replace them with newer, compliant vehicles. The original scrapping allowance was R50 000 per qualifying vehicle.

The programme was later revised, with the scrapping allowance eventually increased to R124 000. By September 2018, government said 72 652 old taxi vehicles had been scrapped and R4.4 billion paid in allowances.

The fact that the programme had to be revised says something about the difficulty of reforming the sector.

Government's own review identified problems including the affordability of new vehicles, the size of the scrapping allowance and illegal taxi operations.

The industry has also had to contend with changing technology and competition from e-hailing services.

Yet there is another problem that cannot be fixed by changing vehicles or writing new regulations: our cities were never properly designed around the transport realities of the majority of their residents.

Apartheid spatial planning pushed black communities to the margins of economic centres, often leaving people living long distances from their workplaces. That spatial legacy remains visible today.

Our transport infrastructure has not always caught up with the way South Africans actually move. Too many roads have inadequate taxi ranks, loading zones and safe drop-off points.

Drivers are then criticised, sometimes legitimately, for stopping where they should not. But inadequate infrastructure leaves with limited options. At the same time, poor infrastructure is not an excuse for reckless or selfish driving. Taxi drivers who stop in traffic lanes when safe alternatives exist, overload vehicles, ignore traffic signals or endanger pedestrians must be held accountable. The fact that the industry performs an essential public function does not place it above the law.

The challenge is to achieve both professionalism and practicality.

There are already efforts to professionalise the industry, formalise its operations and integrate it more effectively into the broader public transport system. The Revised Taxi Recapitalisation Programme has moved beyond simply scrapping old vehicles to issues such as commercialisation, economic sustainability and formalising industry operations.

Government has also been working on a broader public transport funding model. More recent policy proposals have contemplated expanding public transport funding to include the taxi industry.

If government expects taxi operators to provide an essential public service, it must engage honestly with the costs of doing so.

If operators want greater recognition, support and integration into the public transport system, they must accept the corresponding responsibilities of safety, accountability, licensing and professional conduct.

The taxi industry should not be romanticised. Nor should it be demonised. It has provided an essential service to millions of South Africans while creating substantial black-owned wealth and employment. It has also been associated with violence, intimidation, unsafe vehicles, unlawful operations and resistance to regulation.

All of those realities can be true at the same time. Transport Month should therefore be about more than celebrating buses, trains, roads and new infrastructure. It should be about asking whether the people who depend most heavily on public transport are getting a system that is safe, affordable, reliable and properly integrated.

For as long as millions of South Africans depend on a minibus taxi to get to work every morning, the taxi industry will remain central to the country's economy. We ignore that reality at our peril.

Mdadane is an executive editor at the National Media Group.