Minibus taxis provide the majority of workers with transport, so the lockdown has hit the industry particularly hard. There has been some financial relief for taxi owners and employees, but not all qualify for the aid. And this offers an opportunity for SA to reshape the taxi industry.
As soon as the lockdown was announced, SA Taxi Finance, the largest provider of finance to the sector, announced it would provide interim repayment assistance to taxi operators to help them honour their financial commitments for April.
However, many taxi sector employees will not be able to access financial relief from the Unemploment Insurance Fund (UIF) and Temporary Employee Relief Scheme (Ters) due to the limited compliance of their employers. To quote from the UIF's 2018/2019 annual report: “Unfortunately, the taxi sector has been slow in complying with the fund’s requirements and continues to resist attempts by the fund to register as can be seen in the negligible increase in registrations during the past year.”
The UIF reported that by end-March 2019, 7,432 taxi employers had registered, covering only 7,211 employees, a somewhat curious (although not impossible) pair of statistics.
In view of the situation, SA’s biggest taxi association, Santaco, announced the launch of an independent relief fund to support the taxi industry through the Covid-19 crisis. An article on the fund quotes a senior Santaco official who notes the critical role the taxi sector plays in “ensuring essential service workers are taken to work as well as commuters that keep the economy of the country going”.
According to the report, the association has called on “stakeholders in the taxi industry, such as food retailers, taxi dealerships, tyres and parts manufacturers, banks and other industry players to come together with the taxi industry and contribute to the fund.”
But since the initial announcement there has been little information from Santaco about the application process to receive relief from the fund. Santaco’s website makes no mention of the fund (their last media release update was in 2018). And they have announced no further information on their social media pages.
Nevertheless, in many ways such a fund offers enormous opportunity. Access to funding seldom comes without strings attached, and the strings attached to this funding could reshape the taxi sector and public transport in SA in fundamental ways.
As a first step, taxi operators should be required to register with the UIF as a non-negotiable precondition for aid.
It could go further. Discussions about digitising fare collection and getting rid of cash payments by commuters — which must have started almost 20 years ago — have to date yielded nothing. So another precondition for access to funding could include not only requirements in this regard, but actual implementation.
Taxis that are funded must have “tap and pay” devices fitted. Not only would this support the fiscus in the future, but less cash moving from hand to hand protects everyone — a benefit that must be on the top of our minds right now.
Perhaps telematics offers the most interesting opportunity of all. Taxi financiers already require tracking devices to be fitted to vehicles to mitigate the risk of theft and to locate vehicles that need to be repossessed.
SA Taxi Finance is reported to have already introduced telematics to monitor and improve drivers’ behaviour of the 30,000 taxis it finances. To qualify for their payment relief they could insist on a functioning telematics device in all vehicles.
More can be done to implement telematics into the estimated 250,000 minibus taxis operating in SA. As Discovery has highlighted to the chagrin of bad drivers who have had such devices installed in their own vehicles, telematics can be used to identify reckless driving patterns.
Beyond this, more advanced technology can also allow some degree of remote control. For example, the Rwandan Utilities Regulatory Authority requires public transport vehicles to be fitted with a “speed governor”, a device that prevents vehicles from travelling faster than 60km/h. It can reduce vehicle speeds to 25km/h if maximum speeds are exceeded. An on-board computer also enables law enforcement officers to review previous speeds and indicates if the device has been tampered with, which is a criminal offence.
Given the critical role the taxi sector plays in transporting essential service workers and enabling the functioning of the economy as a whole, the sector would no doubt agree that such interventions are a priority.
• Melzer is engagement manager at 71point4 Consulting.
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