Durban - As Durban’s bus service sinks deeper into a quagmire, the eThekwini Municipality’s executive committee is grappling with how to extricate the city from its disastrous relationship with one of the country’s most powerful and politically connected taxi families.
On Tuesday it emerged that in the last exco meeting last year, ANC committee members suggested buying Tansnat Durban, the floundering company that has the contract to run the buses.
The company is owned by Mandla Gcaba, a nephew of President Jacob Zuma, who is also involved in running the Gcaba Brothers minibus taxi business.
Gcaba is accused in court papers, by the municipality, which is applying for Tansnat Durban’s liquidation, of taking an unsecured loan from the bus business of R30.7 million.
The city also alleges that the company has no current financial statements.
Deputy mayor Nomvuzo Shabalala said the city was researching the possibility of creating an entity to run the public transport company - similar to how uShaka Marine World was managed.
“There is a lot of research that we have to do as the municipality. That is why it took us so long to finalise the issue,” she said.
Shabalala justified the millions of rands in bailouts that had been paid to Tansnat by the city, saying the council had to intervene when the company repeatedly fell into financial trouble.
“We are responsible for servicing the community; we could not just fold our arms when drivers were on strike, because people could not get to work. We had to make those decisions.”
During a press briefing in Durban on Tuesday, the SACP, whose provincial chairman is mayor James Nxumalo, insisted that the fleet be removed from Gcaba.
SACP provincial secretary Themba Mthembu said the party had always been opposed to the idea of outsourcing the city’s public transport department.
He said the local authority had misled the public by claiming it was forced to outsource the fleet because of provincial government subsidy policy that prevented municipalities from running the bus service.
“They owe the public and ratepayers of eThekwini an apology for misleading them,” he said.
“The Johannesburg municipality owns its buses, Cape Town owns its buses. Many municipalities own buses. We were wondering why eThekwini behaves as if it is outside South Africa.”
The party called for an investigation of the way the fleet had been handled.
National Freedom Party chief whip Thabani Mthethwa agreed that the council had to take back the buses.
The DA and the IFP said they were against the city’s buying Tansnat. They argued that there was the possibility that the entity might then need to be bailed out.
“In our final exco meeting last year the ANC proposed this and we rejected it because we want the bus service to be able to function without constantly being bailed out,” said DA caucus leader Zwakele Mncwango.
It was not a sound business decision to “buy a company that owes you millions to try getting it back on a good financial footing”.
The IFP’s Mdu Nkosi said their proposal was for the bus service to be divided into four sections with different companies operating in different regions of eThekwini. If one company got into difficulty, the rest would keep running.
“The reason Tansnat has been battling financially is because the Gcaba’s are running it like their informal business. They don’t even keep financial records. We keep bailing them out, but we don’t know what they are using the money for,” said Nkosi.
He said the city had an opportunity to get out of the deal with Tansnat when the contract was declared illegal in 2010 after some local operators complained that Tansnat had been given the deal without an open tender process.
This led to the contract’s being renewed on a monthly basis.
Several attempts to contact Gcaba for comment have been unsuccessful.
His attorney Sandile Khoza said they were working on an answering affidavit to the liquidation application which they planned to file by January 28.
“We can’t really discuss the matter until the court processes have run their course,” he said.
The Mercury