Except for the Port of Gqberha (Port Elizabeth), South Africa’s main ports of Ngqura, Durban and Cape Town have again been outperformed by their Sub-Saharan rivals in the latest Container Port Performance Index (CPPI) – slipping to dead last in the region’s rankings.
According to box-handling data for 2022, gathered by the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence, the three ports are respectively ranked at 338, 341 and 344 out of the 348 ports measured by the CPPI’s compilers.
If it’s any consolation, the US West Coast Port of Long Beach, battling to bounce back from congestion since the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on American ports, is 3rd last on the CPPI.
Two other major ports, Vancouver in Canada and Savannah on the US East Coast, are ranked at 347 and 348, the last two slots on the CPPI.
Africa’s best port by far, and not just in the Sub-Saharan region, is Djibouti which has scored and overall ranking of 26.
Its closest rival in the same immediate vicinity is Berbera on the Horn of Africa, ranked 144.
Mozambique’s ports of Beira and Maputo also outperformed South Africa’s ports, and are respectively ranked 223 and 248.
Gqberha is the only South African port that didn’t slip below the 300-mark and is ranked 291.
Walvis Bay in Namibia is ranked 293 and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, 312.
Luanda in Angola also performed rather dismally and is ranked 337.
In the previous CPPI which recorded the data of 366 ports, Luanda scraped the very bottom of the barrel.
Durban and Cape Town only performed marginally better, ranked 364 and 365.
A consecutive poor showing by ports like the latter suggests that nothing has come of attempts by South Africa’s logistics utility, Transnet, to improve throughput at the country’s notoriously slow-working ports.
