OPINION - One major area that the government does not seem to have much control over, from day one of post-apartheid, is the lawless taxi industry.
No private organisation, including self-serving charitable organisations and NGOs, exist except to make some profit.
The taxi industry is doing NO FAVOURS out of the goodness of taxi bosses.
The last consideration is the welfare of anybody else - exactly like all supermarkets, industries, logistic firms, private hospitals, and even many, many private medical practitioners.
Let’s not bluff ourselves.
Even among the teaching fraternity, including the highfalutin education departments and all private schools, it’s all about a salary at the end, for front-counter service personnel and some hefty dividends to shareholders.
No complaint about any of that! It’s the system.
During Covid-19, almost everybody is taking an economic knock: industries, shops, service-providers, restaurants, governing bodies and private school educators. Restrictions at supermarkets, additional staff to control sanitising, long queues everywhere, have all added to costs and reduced profits.
Learners have been deprived of basic education.
The point is: virtually everybody, has been adversely affected! We all are suffering losses! But WHY does the taxi industry so rigidly believe that it is exempted from losses like the rest of us?
What exactly allows it, from day one, to break virtually all the rules that the rest of us are subjected to?
Parking, overtaking, speeding, rude behaviour, drugged drivers, etc, and now insisting on challenging the vital, possibly the only life-saving device, of maintaining a safe distance from anybody else, by loading every inch of space in their vehicles!?
The psychological effect on commuters who daily experience this lawlessness that escapes any form of effective prosecution can only be imagined as having a knock-on chain reaction that probably encourages indiscipline and fosters some form of frustration and anger at other systems.
It’s absolutely of no value to keep the minority at bay with rules to stop infections when the majority workforce is unable to be controlled. The taxi industry must be told: Conform or close down!!
Ebrahim Essa Durban