JONATHAN JANSEN | Why taxis? Why now? Something was off about the DA’s clampdown

Why now? That’s the question taxi drivers repeatedly asked me during interviews this week. They (the DA) took over the government of the province in 2009, I was told. Why this sudden and dramatic clampdown on taxis that break the law? They answered their own question: it’s all politics.

Something was seriously off about the DA’s very muscular and manly clamp down on taxis. It was not just the rare decisiveness of local politicians as they made a public show of impounding taxis en masse. It was also the gleefulness with which their supporters took to social media that was cause for concern.

None of these gloaters asked the question how it came to be that all the whites were living in posh suburbs around the city while the black poor had to run the daily gauntlet of dodgy taxi rides from faraway Delft and Khayelitsha to get there for work.

Nonetheless, it was clear that the DA’s political operators had tapped into a long simmering anger against taxi drivers, and that they were now riding the wave of middle-class Schadenfreude. It was as if there was, after years of taxi’s cutting-in, speeding up, knocking down, ignoring traffic lights, blocking roads and endangering lives, an opportunity to finally say donner hulle.

That’s where my worry stems from. Is what happened in 2023 simply another way of doing what the apartheid government did in 1993? Hear me out. Both the national government then and the provincial government now professed a higher moral purpose for their actions, what they called law and order.

The picture of this government’s enforcers smashing taxi windows and pressing the faces of drivers into the ground as they handcuffed working men therefore left me uncomfortable. Not the enforcement of the law but the kragdadigheid these images reminded me of from the recent past. An image from my childhood I have not managed to erase from memory is that of white male police harassing a well-dressed, young African man along a main road in Cape Town under the pass laws; then and now that humiliation makes me angry.

Has the mayor called the family of the British doctor who was killed during the mayhem? Did he attend the funerals of the other souls whose lives and livelihoods were so tragically ended during the taxi strike?

Have we forgotten so soon how we got here?

By now you must be choking on your morning muffin, so let me say the obvious. Many, not all, taxi drivers are a menace to their passengers and others on the roads whether pedestrians or fellow drivers.

Yes, there must be laws and they must be obeyed. However, securing compliance with the law must be done in ways that ensure the safety and well-being of all our people. That’s why God gave us brains, to figure out how to do difficult things such as manage public transport operators. Not to impulsively rain down terror on taxi drivers thirty years into our democracy.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Did Messrs Hill-Lewis (mayor) and Smith (mayoral committee member responsible for safety and security) really think such a forceful clampdown could happen without the loss of life? Does the image of two tough-talking white men acting as enforcers of law-and-order over black taxi drivers not matter given our long and painful racist history?

And, by the way, if anyone tells you five people died, they are lying; that number is higher. Even so, one death is too many.

Now about the almost daily spectacle we are treated to by our First Citizen’s marketing team. Has the mayor called the family of the British doctor who was killed during the mayhem? Did he attend the funerals of the other souls whose lives and livelihoods were so tragically ended during the taxi strike? Why on earth could this senseless loss of life not have been foreseen? Or do we think that fighting fire with fire is how to enforce law and order?

Put bluntly, did we learn anything from our murderous past?

Of course, it’s about politics. That is why the ANC’s national minister of transport responded with such froth all the while looking as if she had not read her own laws of the road. At the same time, the DA-led provincial government must be licking its electoral lips: they definitely won in the publicity stakes after this tragic clampdown. They will surely win the province by a larger share of the vote come 2024; that, after all, was the plan.

What I am also dead sure about is that this public performance of law and order for electoral advantage will change nothing in the long term. Sooner or later all the taxis will return to (ab)normal and ride unroadworthy vehicles without licences while cramming passengers into hobbling minibuses with smooth tyres.

There are simply too many taxis, too much commuter desperation and too little real interest in black lives to keep this show of force going.

As the sun set on Tuesday in a place perhaps suitably called Oblivion, I listened intently to the story of a taxi-driver’s life. How his family was moved from Wynberg to Manenberg due to the Group Areas Act, to make place for whites. His mother was dumbstruck by official cruelty and shortly afterwards died in her sleep, a day before she was about to go on her first ever holiday.

The driver chokes up, looks away. His parents only had a lower primary education. For years his father was a taxi driver, allowed only one licence by the apartheid government. To honour his parents, he decided to take over the taxi business, determined to acknowledge their struggles and make them proud.

Next time you gloat about law and order in the taxi industry, remember this man — and how we got here in the first place.