Taxi industry welcomes Blade Nzimande's recapitalisation programme

As transport minister Blade Nzimande announces a Revised Taxi Recapitalisation Programme (RTRP) on Friday, taxi operators say they hope the new scrapping system will come with better benefits and be more transparent.

Nzimande is expected to brief the media about the new taxi-scrapping agency that will facilitate the programme on behalf of the department.

This will be a second phase of RTRP after the previous scrapping contract ended in September.

A new service provider was appointed on March 1 and will soon commence with the actual scrapping of vehicles in various provinces.

South African National Taxi Council  spokesperson, Thabiso Molelekwa, said they were looking forward to the announcement.

“Following numerous interactions that we had with the minister around the same programme where we raised our concerns, we hope that RTRP will address those concerns to show signs of improvement from the previous version and government’s commitment towards addressing taxi related challenges,” he said.

Molelekwa said their biggest concern was around the allowance. 

“As we look forward to the new recap with renewed hope we can only hope that it will add more enthusiasm and interest. Operators have been so reluctant to scrap their taxis because of among other things the scraping allowance.

“The allowance was around R70,000 or R80,000. Our argument was that since the introduction of the taxi recap in 2000, the production of compliant vehicles had become quiet expensive and now cost around R300 000,” Molelekwa said.

“Now if you were to give someone a scrapping allowance of around R60,000, that is not even enough to qualify as a deposit. It would then mean that the operator will have to put more money on top of the deposit which resulted in pressure on the instalment,” he said.

National Taxi Alliance spokesperson Theo Malele said the benefits of RTRP must be shared equally. Malele said there must be transparency in the new programme.

“There must be investigations into how the money was spread in the old system. We believe there was malfeasance of funds that must be investigated. There are mixed reactions from our side,” he said.

Malele said he hoped the new system would benefit the end user.

“The R68,000 that operators received is not enough, vehicles cost between R200,000 and R440,000. The approved vehicles from China were of poor quality. Their seats are narrow and uncomfortable,” he said. 

RTRP is an intervention by government to bring about safe, effective, reliable, affordable taxi vehicles. It introduced vehicles designed to undertake public transport functions in the taxi industry.