Harbour carriers in South Africa are doing whatever they can to remain in business while facing mounting odds stemming from congestion at the Durban Container Terminal (DCT) and an automated truck-slot booking system accused of failure at several ports.
An operator who spoke to Freight News ahead of National Women’s Day on August 9, said her life as a wife and mother had been upended because she had to do whatever she could to help her husband to prevent their 11-year-old business, Avante Movers, from closing its doors.
“Recently we had 22 containers (TEUs) to move. Usually, it would take three days to clear, but it took us nine days,” said Annalene Bholla.
The underlying causes for the delay in carriers clearing boxes at DCT Pier 2 included the unavailability of slots, containers waiting in staging, and no new slots being added where pick-up allocations were forfeited, mainly because of transporters being stuck in truck traffic building up outside Pier 2.
All the complaints raised by Bholla have been mentioned before and were last week cited as directly resulting in the kind of income loss that has led a 17-year-old carrier, Africa Trans Carriers, to close down.
Primarily, harbour carriers say it has become impossible to secure enough slots to make any profit unless you are constantly on the Navis booking system, day and night, to fetch imports at DCT – which is what Bholla is doing.
“Often we go into the system and it says ‘quota reached’ but when you refresh your screen it shows there are slots available. As soon as you try and secure these slots, it says the same thing – ‘quota reached’.
“Other times, the system is hanging, and nothing happens. It comes down to us playing a guessing game and continuously sitting on Navis to wait for an opening in the hope that we’ll get a slot.”
She said Avante was not making any profit while getting deeper into debt.
Africa Trans Carriers founder, Junaid Abbas, said last week it was a position he and his business partner, Aadil Osman, had decided to avoid – getting out while they still could by selling their R15 million fleet of eight trucks.
Bholla’s husband, Naresh, said their lifestyle had changed because of what was happening at DCT.
“We have surpassed the laws of how long a driver should actually be sitting in a truck. Our staff are getting underpaid because we have moved from the normal pay system to an incentive-based system.”
He said they had had no other option because, generally, it took an entire shift of eight hours for a driver to wait. When cargo is finally on the back of a truck, delivery is only done, in another shift, when the same driver should ordinarily be doing another pick-up.
To scale down, Avente last year laid off its operations manager, bookkeeper and breakdown mechanic.
“My wife and I have taken up those positions. She does the accounts and bookings while I look after breakdowns. We have sideboards in our bedroom for our laptops to see if you can get bookings, no matter what time of day.
“When my wife packs lunch for our children in the morning she checks in with the system to see if there haven’t been any review of slots. When she fetches them at school she sits with her laptop in the car, just in case a booking becomes available.”
The couple said they were constantly complaining to Transnet about the booking system, but executives did not reply.
Instead, the logistics utility’s IT department will confirm that there is a “a system failure” without any date or time provided when the system will be up and running again.
Earlier this week Transnet chief executive for Durban Terminals, Earle Peters, defended the system, saying it was used with success by 66 other container terminals across the world.
Naresh Bholla said: “It’s not feasible. It’s an absolute failure. The system would have been functional if they were efficient inside. The booking system has captured our lives. I used to run a paid-for fleet of six trucks. Now the bank owns my fleet.”
In Cape Town similar complaints over the booking system for trucks at the port have been raised.
Clifford Evans, customs liaison officer at Berry & Donaldson, has said that Transnet’s inability to effectively facilitate trade for harbour carriers has caused the freight forwarder to close down its truck division.
“It was simply not feasible any more,” he said.
Earlier this week the SA Transporters Alliance said what many transporters across the country are saying, that the current truck booking system was a disaster for harbour carriers.
