The news that the Carletonville United Taxi Association in Gauteng will start fining drivers for poor hygiene or the condition of their taxis has once again revealed South Africa’s peculiar relationship with our paradoxically — and toxically — private public transport.
According to TimesLIVE, the CUTA crackdown isn’t being welcomed by everyone, prompting the site to run a poll this week asking: “Should taxi associations have the right to police drivers’ personal hygiene and clothing?”
At the time of writing over 80% of readers had answered in the affirmative, clicking on “Yes, taxi drivers represent the industry and should maintain basic hygiene and dress standards to ensure comfort and respect for passengers.”
As someone who used to travel to school and university by taxi quite often, I must say that the state of the driver never bothered me much — he was always a fairly aloof presence anyway, sitting with his back to us as his gaatjie did all the interpersonal stuff — and as long as the taxi had four wheels and a steering wheel I was generally content. Still, I can understand why other passengers might want a less, er, robust commuting experience.
What really stands out about the whole story, however, is how it once again reveals the unconscious habit we have of telling ourselves two thought-ending clichés, namely, that taxi bosses are part of an “industry”, with everything that word implies, and that it is the drivers who are somehow most responsible for the generally dodgy state of that so-called industry.
Certainly, there can be very few legal hustles outside evangelical Christianity where the most powerful players make as much money with as little regulation while paying as little tax.
Of course, it’s not really our fault that we believe the first myth: the government and the media have been calling the taxi mafia an “industry” for decades, convincing us that it is a regulated, taxed and generally formalised part of the national economy, and not a chaotic federation of privateers incorporating everyone from hard-working mom-and-pop set-ups and gogos using their stokvel money all the way up to mafia godfathers who have the power to stop national insurrections spreading from KwaZulu-Natal into neighbouring provinces, as they reportedly did in 2021, and who are being paid to protect big business from extortion rackets and “business forums”.
Certainly, there can be very few legal hustles outside evangelical Christianity where the most powerful players make as much money with as little regulation while paying as little tax. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of millions we taxpayers keep handing them, courtesy of schemes like Ethekwini’s Public Transport Service Improvement Incentives Programme, which flings R200m at Ethekwini’s taxi bosses, or the “one-off taxi gratuity” allocated in the 2025/26 national budget, in which R408m of our money will be sprayed at a variety of well-placed figures as part of the R1.13bn cabinet agreed to pay them as Covid-19 relief funds.
As for the second trope — that taxi drivers are a nasty lot who need to clean up their act — well, that’s also inaccurate: while it true that many drivers treat the rules of the road and the laws of physics with contempt, it is also true that most live extremely precarious lives, often facing the kind of exploitation that would make 19th century industrialists blush.
More importantly, when drivers blockade highways, they are obeying the orders of their bosses; taxi owners who will fire them in a heartbeat if they dissent; owners who might fire them anyway even if they do obey but get fined or towed away by police; owners who somehow escape the same criticism and scrutiny the media and the middle class tend to aim solely at drivers.
All of which is why the next time you hear anything about the taxi “industry”, it might be worth remembering what it really is: a chaotic multibillion-rand gold rush straight out of the earliest days of Wild West capitalism, operating beyond the law and beyond Sars, whose continued existence is guaranteed by the state’s inability (and, in some cases, suspicious unwillingness) to provide safe, cheap alternatives.
And as for CUTA demanding its drivers wash more often, well, they do say that cleanliness is next to godliness, but let’s be very clear: the kind of cleanup this “industry” needs has nothing to do with soap.
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