South Africa’s new minister of transport will have to focus on four crucial aspects of vital importance to the sector, Road Freight Association CEO Gavin Kelly has said ahead of last night’s Cabinet re-shuffle by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
These are human mobility and resolving the manifold challenges faced by this facet of the sector; sorting out the country’s ports, which have been plodding along for too long; road and rail infrastructure and securing these assets; as well as ensuring that the various modalities of the transport sector interconnect functionally.
Emphasising that it was of “critical importance that these things are dealt with,” Kelly especially dwelt on the second issue – fixing the country’s ports.
“We have about 18 months to do that and, if we don’t, we’re going to lose a lot of cargo and vessels to the ports around us,” he said.
“Mozambique, Namibia and Angola are all hungry for that revenue. They know how much money can be generated through efficient ports and they know what sort of jobs are lost when it doesn’t work.
“There are so many industries around supporting ports and they all have various bits and pieces aligned to ports.
“We have to get our ports running to get cargo through quickly and efficiently and we have to get them back to where ships don’t stand outside waiting for ten days while we fiddle with things.”
In addition, Kelly said it was important to invest in our ports, both through infrastructural upgrades and innovation, to enable progress.
“Otherwise our ports will just collapse,” he said.
He singled out Walvis Bay, Namibia’s primary port, saying that it had become well known that the port had plans in place to maximise its throughput figures, possibly taking cargo from South African shippers disillusioned with Transnet*.
Moving on to infrastructure and securitisation, he stressed that the state of our infrastructure must be improved and protected for the state to function optimally.
“The lawlessness on the roads needs to be dealt with,” he said, “otherwise we will just go backwards continually.”
* Freight News will publish an in-depth feature supplement on 19 May, focusing, in particular, on public- and private-sector developments around the Port of Walvis Bay.
