The taxi industry is a law unto itself. Its strike, to make the Western Cape ungovernable, is therefore hard to break.
As I write this on Monday morning, the town where I live has been blockaded. Most of the town’s residents cannot get to work or school. Many restaurants, shops, and offices are closed.
If anyone in my half of the town has a medical emergency, we cannot reach either the provincial or the private hospital. Old-age homes have been begging for volunteers to help feed the hungry. Water deliveries to an area affected by a major pipe burst have been halted. Cars have been stoned and tyres burnt at a key intersection on the only road in and out of town.
The rule, laid down late last week, is that nobody is allowed to pass roadblocks with more than one passenger in the vehicle. Any additional passengers risk being physically removed from the vehicle and made to walk.
If you’re taking your spouse to work and your child to school, one of them is liable to get yanked from the car. White people aren’t allowed to drive into majority-black suburbs, on the grounds that they’re probably there to pick up staff, and all staff transport is verboten.
The reason for the blockade is that the South African National Taxi Council (SANTACO) has a dispute with Cape Town over how certain laws are enforced.
Hinterland
What that has to do with the poor people in the hinterland is beyond me, but as soon as I’ve finished this column, I’m going to raise an army from places like Uniondale, De Rust, Kruidfontein, Barrydale, Greyton, Ceres, Wuppertal, Klawer, Piketberg, and other places brought to a standstill by the Western Cape taxi strike.
We shall march on Cape Town, take Signal Hill, point its cannon at the City Hall, and demand that mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis swiftly amend the National Land Transport Act.
We shall also demand that the Western Cape surrender local and provincial law enforcement powers to Bheki Cele, so that taxis don’t get oppressed by having the law enforced upon them.
Raising the support of the outlying towns and villages must be why SANTACO called a province-wide strike in its beef with the City of Cape Town. It brought towns as far as 500km away to their knees.
In its latest missive about its refusal to entertain talks with the City, SANTACO helpfully emphasised that it only calls for a taxi stayaway, and not for blockades, protests, violence or burning police vehicles and rival public transport facilities. All of these have happened, but are not to be blamed on SANTACO.
That our town is being strangled by a taxi blockade, therefore, can only be laid at the feet of the tyrannical ruling class of Cape Town.
Vive la révolution!
Ungovernable
I’m kidding, of course. It isn’t within the Cape Town mayor’s power to amend national legislation. Enforcing the law with respect to taxis is a legitimate function of the City of Cape Town. And although there are thousands of disgruntled residents, I couldn’t ride forth to raise an army because the town is blockaded.
I don’t particularly care about the details of SANTACO’s dispute with Cape Town. It has a few valid points, but it is also trying to avoid legitimate law enforcement actions.
I’m much more concerned about what the strike says about the state of the country.
The real reason the strike was called throughout the Western Cape is because the province is led by the Democratic Alliance (DA), as is the City of Cape Town. SANTACO is merely acting as a proxy for the ANC, as demonstrated by the presence of Bheki Cele – who has nothing to do with transport – at the meeting where the strike was called.
The ANC cannot tolerate a successful Western Cape. It puts the rest of the country, which is mostly ANC-run, to shame. So, it tries to make the Western Cape appear ungovernable in the run-up to the 2024 elections, just as it did by whipping up farmworker protests prior to the elections of 2014.
Exploiting taxi grievances about strict law enforcement is easy. They used this to engineer a strike throughout the Western Cape even though the ostensible dispute is only with the City of Cape Town.
This also explains why the police is nowhere to be seen. Although we had a brief visit from the Public Order Police from out of town in one violent hotspot on Saturday night, the local police has been notably absent from the illegal taxi blockades at which passengers were unlawfully pulled from vehicles.
Also entirely absent in the days since the strike started are the worthies occupying the highly paid seats in our ANC-controlled municipality. There has been no sign of the mayor, the municipal manager, or the director of community service (under whom law enforcement falls).
After all, they’re there to draw a salary, to crank rates and electricity prices to extortionate levels, and to loot the public purse. They’re not there to govern a successful town and see it thrive.
Bigger-gang theory
It is a common libertarian trope that the government is simply the biggest crime gang around.
It has more firepower than smaller criminal gangs. Businesses in its territory can operate only with its permission, and upon kicking back a percentage of their take. It promises protection in return for tax. Government operates very much like the mafia, except it pretends to be the good guys.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but an instructive one.
In South Africa, however, it does not hold. The South African government is not the biggest gang in town. It doesn’t even try to be the biggest gang in town.
At these taxi roadblocks, crimes were committed, reported, and widely witnessed, but there was not a blue light in sight. The law was non-existent. The rules for us, the citizens, were made and enforced by the taxi owners.
If the taxi industry wanted, it could bring the entire country to its knees and hold it hostage until we all cried ‘uncle’.
There is no appetite among the police – and particularly the national SAPS – to enforce the law against the taxi industry. They know they’re outmatched.
In South Africa, the taxi industry is the biggest gang in town, and most of the population is entirely at its mercy, without any recourse to the lawful authorities.
Black capitalists
The taxi industry initially emerged as an efficient response by black capitalists to the cruel spatial segregation of apartheid. Non-white people were expelled from the cities and towns, and forced to live in barren townships on the urban periphery, far from their workplaces.
The townships remained barren because most land was held by the state, and most business – other than general dealerships, ‘native’ eating-houses, restaurants, milkshops, butcheries, greengrocers, and hawking – was forbidden. Without private property or the right to engage in businesses, the mostly black township population could never develop a ‘separate but equal’ economy, to use a famous apartheid propaganda term.
The vast majority were therefore forced to travel long distances to work, which required transport. Few could afford private vehicles, so the majority relied on public transport, of which there simply was not enough.
When some of the restrictions on township business were lifted after the Soweto uprising of 1976, entrepreneurs began to offer transport services using minibuses. The apartheid government initially restricted taxis, but then deregulated them in order to preserve a positive image of ‘popular capitalism’. By the early 1990s, the government had stopped enforcing permits altogether.
Taxis competed very well with public transport, offering greater flexibility and cost-effective fares even though trains and buses were (and continue to be) subsidised by the government. It provided, and still provides, an important service to people with working-class incomes. It ought to be commended for this.
However, all was not well.
Mafia
‘Rather than an advertisement for free market economics, the permit “confetti” arising from deregulation resulted in acute competition between operators and produced the violence that is now endemic in the taxi industry,’ wrote Jackie Dugard in 2001, in a seminal paper for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. ‘A major factor behind the violence that has come to be associated with the taxi industry has been the unchecked rise of taxi associations as informal agents of regulation.’
Backed by enforcers and hit squads, mother bodies controlled taxi associations, and taxi associations claimed monopolies on routes.
The long story can be read in a report on the taxi industry published by the Institute of Race Relations in January 2020.
To make that long story short, when government attempted to re-regulate the industry, largely by bribing taxi owners with recapitalisation schemes, it made the cardinal mistake of recognising SANTACO as the sole authorised representative of the taxi industry, and allowing taxi associations to act as proxies for the issuing of operating permits and route assignments.
Instead of protecting would-be competitors in a free market, the government formalised the mafia-style organisation and illegitimate route monopoly claims of the industry.
The government’s objectives were never met. Despite appeasing and recapitalising the industry, the roads are still packed with unroadworthy taxi vehicles. Violence over routes is still taking place. New rivals still cannot enter the market with a better offering without the approval of the incumbents.
The taxi industry has become a law unto itself, because government made it so.
Government’s role
It is also a trope among libertarians that the more inefficient and ineffective a government is, the more free the people are.
The taxi industry demonstrates why that isn’t true, however. We need at least a minimal government that protects life, liberty and property.
We need a government that is able to enforce the law, protect people and their property against monopoly abuses, and act effectively against criminal violence.
The Western Cape government has tried to enforce what laws it can to maintain safety on public roads and public transport, but it cannot do anything about national laws, or national law enforcement.
The ruling ANC is the architect of the taxi mafia, so we cannot look to it for help, either.
A new government will have to revisit the entire permit system which allows taxi associations to maintain route monopolies and motivates them to shoot at would-be rivals.
It will need a police force that has the right capabilities to go toe-to-toe with the taxi industry, which won’t take the breakup of its mafia empire lying down.
As I wrote in that IRR report, we need policies designed to establish successful policing of anti-competitive behaviour, unsafe vehicles, overloading and reckless driving, and we need laws that reduce the cartel power of taxi associations, promote competition, and lower barriers to entry for new operators.
This will be a gargantuan task. It could take a decade, and it will not be concluded painlessly.
Until then, the taxi industry has more power than even competent, determined governments like those of Cape Town and the Western Cape.
The hapless citizens of South Africa will just have to live with it when the taxi bosses stamp their feet and hold millions of people to ransom.
They were given that power by the government, and now we reap the consequences.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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