Bus operator Putco suspended its services on Thursday, saying it had not received its March subsidy from the Gauteng department of roads and transport and did not have money to buy diesel. This left more than 200,000 commuters — most of whom who would have bought their bus tickets in advance — stranded in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
Putco spokesperson Lindokuhle Xulu blamed the “underfunding of the bus public transport industry” as well as “excessive fuel increases ... worsening the situation”. The provincial department acknowledged there had been delays in the processing of payments for subsidised bus operators. It added, however, this happened every financial year, with a delay in the public transport operating grant only being transferred to the province by the national transport department in the first week of May, a “widely known procedure”. “The department now manages 34 bus subsidy contracts awarded to 13 bus operators, Putco among them,” the department said. It said the payment had been captured and would reflect in Putco’s bank account on Monday.
The department’s statement implied that Putco management should have planned for this. It would have known this was going to happen, as it happens very year. Putco insists it alerted the department well ahead of time that it urgently needed the money from the subsidy. By the end of Thursday, after placing immense pressure on the provincial roads department, it was announced its fleet would be back up and running by Friday.
This is a huge relief to commuters who rely on the bus service to earn their livelihoods every day. These are South Africans who — just like Putco — are also buckling under financial pressures and can probably least afford forking out additional money for transport their households had not budgeted for. At the end of the day, hundreds of thousands of people were left high and dry because those in charge of a service they had already paid for were not in a position to find a solution in advance.
Putco MD Franco Pisapia said the reason their buses would be back on the road on Friday was because the assurances from the provincial government that the money would reflect in its account helped the operator to convince their supplier to provide diesel on credit. He told EWN the company had been running at a loss for 10 years and did not have the reserves to continue to operate without the subsidy from government.
This statement goes to the heart of Thursday’s problem. While Putco publicly put the province under fire for “not paying” its subsidy, the truth is the bus operator is in such dire straits that it was in no position to make contingency plans for the delays in the May payment, which it has managed to cope with in previous years.
The operator has been hit by a series of setbacks. At the height of Covid-19, in 2021, when lockdown restrictions limited people’s ability to travel, Putco was forced to retrench more than 200 people. Even before then, its reputation was questionable. In November 2019, Gauteng’s then public transport and roads MEC Jacob Mamabolo stepped in after several Putco buses were involved in road accidents. He called on Putco management to account for the spate of accidents involving their buses. “It cannot be right that our commuters continue to be subjected to these traumatic events and loss of lives,” he said.
All of this came ahead of a report released last year by the public protector, finding that the Gauteng roads and transport department had irregularly renewed its contract with Putco, which had been enjoying a monopoly in the industry for the past 20 years. Its contract with the provincial roads and transport department was continuously extended without a competitive bidding process taking place. The public protector directed the roads and transport MEC to monitor compliance regarding contract management and referred the matter to the competition commissioner for further investigation.
Putco’s move on Thursday to halt its services at the last minute should serve as an urgent reminder to the Gauteng roads department to take a closer look at the viability of maintaining its contract with the bus operator. The provincial roads department is just as responsible for the fate of commuters as the struggling bus operator. At the end of the day, public transport exists to serve the man in the street. And he or she deserves better.
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