On Friday, an essential scholar transport dialogue made the wrong decision. It made the same decision that corrupted the taxi industry and caused the deaths of thousands. It registered scholar transport providers with an association.
In South Africa, transport associations are the gatekeepers to routes and contracts. Gatekeepers become Mafia organisations that determine who gets registered, who gets contracts and who must pay membership fees.
People who get excluded start rival associations and so the warfare begins. The Department of Mobility and Infrastructure must urgently rethink this model.
This is the same model that has led to decades of taxi wars across the country.
They need to envision scholar transport associations starting up in Delft, Khayelitsha, Philippi and Manenberg and the fight over routes that this will lead to.
Will the children who live in Khayelitsha now have to be dropped at the entrance to Mitchells Plain because the Mitchells Plain association have declared that they are the only scholar transport service provider in Mitchells Plain?
We have been here before. Communities are currently living through this hell where taxi associations dominate routes and kill each other over it. Do we now want to introduce another layer of “associations”, which is just another word for a transport mafia into this warfare at the cost of our children’s lives?
Parents will now have to worry whether an unscrupulous driver from another association will transport children on a route he is not registered for and fear that their children and the driver will now be targeted or even killed.
It appears that the Government have learnt nothing from the history of public transport and particularly from transport association politics in South Africa.
The moment you authorise an important service such as scholar transport, as we did with the minibus taxi industry, you open the door to cartels and mafioso who, in low employment environments, see the opportunity to make millions off the public and government contracts.
The Government calling for private people to form an association of service providers to regulate itself is essentially calling people to form a gang.
That is the history of private-public transport in South Africa. Parents in the Western Cape should not subject the safety of their children to what is now a new layer in this existing warfare.
The Western Cape Education Department have a duty to lead this discussion.
They have stringent regulations about who and how scholar transport should be provided. This is their problem to solve. The Department of Mobility and the City are not the lead agencies on this issue.
If I was a parent who needed scholar transport for my child and I was knowledgeable about transport politics in this country, I would be very worried that the same agents who have captured the private-public transport industry within those two entities are now seeing a new terrain to launch another cartel.
The Mitchells Plain dialogue has all the features of an opportunity for private transport providers to have dominance over a service. Government subsidisation of these "reg-istered" private scholar transport providers is not on the table at this stage. Another lesson is that enforcement without subsidisation is a useless enforcement exercise.
The taxi industry has shown that it doesn’t work. Some bright person once said that you cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it in the first place.
The WCED must stop this dangerous decision of forming scholar transport associations. Children go to schools in various communities across the city. No doubt the taxi industry is watching this dialogue with interest. We will soon see how they will respond to a new association that can now transport children, who previously used their service, on “their routes". This is a very bad decision.
Our children's lives cannot be subjected to another terrain of warfare. And a route warfare this bad decision will become.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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