Creecy approaches banks to seek easier debt repayment deals for taxi industry

The transport department says it has approached banks and Toyota to request easier repayment options for taxi owners on their vehicle loans to curb violence over routes.

This was revealed by minister Barbara Creecy on Thursday, who said the root cause of taxi violence was indebted taxi operators who wanted to pocket more money by taking over routes illegally. She said the taxi industry was struggling to be profitable.

“An operator will make R15,000 to R16,000 a month on an average route. Of course there are more profitable routes. You are earning R16,000 but you have a liability of R28,000, so the question is how do you fill the hole. And that is where the problem begins because you would want to operate on what you regard as a more profitable route,” she said.

Creecy said some operators have resorted to moonlighting as scholar transport operators to close the financial gap. Her department was working with Toyota and the banks to find a way to de-risk the loans, she said.

“I am not saying these financial practices justify irregular practices — they don’t. But I am saying that what we have undertaken is to look at de-risking the loans.”

The industry has been marred by violence recently, with shootings and killings in Katlehong, Soweto and Mpumalanga where even buses have been torched. In the latest incident, Sowetan sister publication TimesLIVE reported that Western Cape detectives were investigating four murders and three attempted murders after a shooting at a taxi rank in Mfuleni last month.

In Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Limpopo there have been incidents of private motorists being intimidated by taxi patrollers for giving lifts to hitchhikers. 

“Having vehicles that are branded ‘highway patrollers’ is not legal. Only the police services and other provincial and municipal safety entities are permitted to brand themselves as highway patrols and [have the power to] stop vehicles,” Creecy said. 

She said her department cannot act as a “nanny” to the taxi industry as it continues to grapple with violent clashes over routes and internal competition.

“We have to encourage this industry where it operates lawfully and where irregular practices are eliminated,” Creecy said.

She has had meetings with national taxi associations focusing on inter-route violence.

“What we are saying to the industry is you can’t turn the minister of transport into a nanny, or the minister of safety into a nanny for the industry. You will compete with each other, you will compete as associations, you will compete for routes — but that competition has to be within the bounds of what we can call normal economic activity.”

Regarding train services, Creecy said the department had managed to recover 35 out of 40 priority lines. The Cape Town to Khayelitsha line was finished about two months ago.

“That was one of the most difficult exercises that we ran because there were people living on top of the tracks, and obviously those people had to be given alternative land and moved,” she said.

“The next phase, now that we’ve got 35 lines operating, is to repair the signals — because at the moment we are running trains on those lines but because we are using manual signals, it means when a train gets into an intersection, it has to phone control to ask if they can cross [to avoid crashes].”

The transport department has been allocated R12bn to replace the signalling, which would help ramp up the number of trains per hour.

“We will first move to three to four trains an hour, but ultimately by 2030 we want rush hour to be running trains every five minutes, depending on demand. This is important because rail is cheaper for commuters, safer and faster. We all know the terrible congestion that we face on our highways.”

Additional reporting by Koena Mashale 

SowetanLIVE