While we focus on the lawlessness of drivers involved in the taxi strike in Cape Town, Gasant Abarder argues that there is much more than just meets the eye. The real villains are the ones pulling the strings on either side of the conflict.
Abarder, who recently launched his book, Hack with a Grenade, is among the country’s most influential media voices. Catch his weekly column here.
My brother made it to my house on Thursday night: late, hungry, exhausted. He has a contract job with a work crew in Table View that is stripping a shopping mall to be refurbished. He dares not be late or take a day off sick because this job has been a long time coming and he is still on probation.
The plan was that I would drive him home to his wife from our place in Kenwyn to Mitchells Plain. But panicked voice notes from the chairperson of my soccer club warned us to stay away. The businessman, who had work in the area, found himself boxed in between two trucks about to be set alight. He had to have all his wits about him to get away safely.
Elsewhere, four hours after leaving work, I was receiving messages from colleagues who were either still on the road or had just come home. The panicked chimes of a school WhatsApp group alerted parents that kids who lived in the far-flung areas of the Cape Flats couldn’t get home. They had to sleep over at classmates whose parents were kind enough to offer a bed in a time of crisis.
The violence has been indiscriminate. Buses have been set alight, cars stoned and there have even been threats to shoot anyone who defies the taxi strike.
The business of who is right and wrong in this taxi strike is a grey area. Resorting to violence is never okay. But it is more than just the drivers blockading the highways and causing mayhem who are culpable. Some of the villains are those behind the wheel. Others wear suits and ties.
I have a colleague who reminded me that taxis run an indispensable service for thousands of workers to get to work and home safely. In the absence of a reliable and predictable public transport system, they ferry moms and dads, school kids and law-abiding citizens to where they need to be.
It is rather naïve for the mayor to say all taxi drivers needed to do was obey the law and their minibuses wouldn’t be impounded. Anyone who has taken a minute to chat with a driver will know their reality: they drive over kerbs and commit moving violations because it is demanded by villain number one: the taxi owner.
The taxi owner demands his takings for the day, and only after this threshold is met do the drivers, who have no benefits in a no-work, no-pay existence, get paid. So, they’re up against the clock all the time and can’t afford to be stuck in traffic.
A study was released a fortnight or so ago by a Cape university on the poor diets of taxi drivers, catching food on the run and how it will leave South Africa with a massive burden of lifestyle disease.
Villain number two is the cowboy of the wild, wild Western Cape, JP Smith. The safety dude who likes behaving like Bheki Cele with his rhetoric. He must have known the taxi industry would react to the impoundings and fines. But he persisted, and it can only be deduced that he sees the millions of Cape Town residents suffering because of the violence as collateral damage.
Yes, the rule of law must be enforced. But not at the price of civilian casualties, job losses, short pay and terror.
What JP didn’t appear to grasp, and what the Daily Maverick so astutely pointed out, was that the taxi strike drove home how apartheid spatial planning was very much alive in Cape Town. It is the people who were forcibly removed to the fringes of the city back in apartheid who are worst affected.
The taxi owners do not care that these are their loyal customers, day in and day out. The city has done very little to integrate affordable housing into suburbs closer to the city.
My brother made it safely home the following night because his boss drove him home. But not all bosses (villain number 3) are as compassionate. They send out messages asking employees to be safe but, in the same breath, reminding them that they will be docked pay if they don’t come to work or that they need to take leave.
The taxi industry and the city need to find a way. They are the leaders. They need to act like leaders now and less like villains.
For running updates on the strike, see here.
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CEOs want to Make SA Great Again … what took you guys so long?
Picture: @TrotskySA / Twitter
