The ongoing protests by bus drivers and other workers tied to the integrated public transport system (IPTS) in the Nelson Mandela Bay City government of Gqeberha is the latest instalment in the series of other labour unrests taking place under coalition local governments across SA.

This workers’ strike is underreported in the mainstream national media, but committed local journalists such as Ntsikelelo Qoyo from The Herald has been engaged with this for the past six-12 months with rigour. Local working-class related stories that emerge outside Gauteng hardly catch national concern, and it is our collective duty as scholars to pull such issues back into the attention of the mainstream, to engage with an informed perspective about what is actually going on in the lives of ordinary working people.

The IPTS system was introduced by the dethroned ANC government of the city, to discontinue its apartheid spatial divisions. The Group Areas Act crafted a racist, divided Port Elizabeth city. The apartheid pass laws and urban influx control to coordinate the movements of cheap black labour was expressed through the racist provision of transport.

White people used cars and designated trains and routes to travel in; whereas the black majority was subjected to a precarious, dangerous, unsafe, private and exploitative taxi industry.

SA does not have any trace of an integrated, accessible, transformed, affordable, comfortable and inclusive public transport system at all. The IPTS system was intended to become such, but its practical implementation has been a disaster. There are already volumes of documented descriptions about the scale of the post-1994 mismanagement.

A well-researched book by Crispian Olver in 2017 revealed the simultaneous greed between political elites and private corporations has crafted the evil art of “how to steal a city”.

The city of Gqeberha has since been stolen from its people and the IPTS system is one of the most lucrative procurement schemes used to benefit elites at the underdevelopment of struggling township communities who have been desperate for affordable public transport.

Despite evident challenges, the IPTS system has been operating in the past few years. Workers have been employed to operate it, and the working poor have been using it to commute. However, the taxi industry has prevented it from reaching townships and student communities for the purpose of enabling the free, affordable movement of people. As a result, it has been unable to generate its potential revenue, and the governance of its available assets has also been eroded.

In fact, when the municipality shifted to being a coalition from 2016-2023, the service has been increasingly getting outsourced and privatised at the expense of the working poor. The bus drivers and other labour in the value chain have been complaining about the late payment of their salaries and benefits since privatisation.

In addition, their working conditions have been grossly precarious. This is the exact same assault labour is facing under the coalition governments of the City of Tshwane and the City of Johannesburg recently. The DA-led coalition government in Tshwane has criminalised and militarised the genuine demands of municipal frontline workers for a 5.4% wage increases as agreed in the 2021 Local Government Bargaining Council.

Corporate media has been used by elite politicians and officials to illegitimise the labour unrests with propaganda disguised as clean governance, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency – yet it is the classical implementation of pure retrenchments, austerity measures, and reversal of black economic empowerement measures to cement the exclusion of black poor people from material upliftment and development.

South Africans must begin to pay close attention to the policy directions of coalition governments, and comprehend their ideological intention is to keep black people trapped in systematic poverty and underdevelopment.

The labour movement must mobilise and concentise workers and the public to see that the struggle for quality service delivery can only be realised when there is a new black people’s left-orientated government in power that prioritises decent wages, labour productivity, anti-apartheid spatial redevelopment and deracialised community coexistence.