Johannesburg - One of the largest taxi association in the country, the National Taxi Alliance (NTA), has expressed shock at the latest ban on long-distance travel in Gauteng.
On Sunday night, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the country would be moved to alert level 4 with immediate effect. Travel in and out of provinces would be halted for two weeks as part of measures to reduce the daily Covid-19 infection rate.
Under the new regulations, leisure travel in and out of Gauteng is prohibited, except in the case of businesses, emergencies, attending a funeral, moving residences or one of the other permitted reasons.
Those that were not in their provinces at the time of the announcement would, however, be allowed to travel back home.
The NTA’s Theo Malele said the industry was going to be negatively impacted.
He said the decision put operators under pressure because they would not be able to meet their monthly commitments and that would affect their well-being.
“We just hope for a miracle happens and that this shall pass,” said Malele.
He could not provide figures of how much the industry would lose in the next two weeks but said it was a lot of money.
“They operate on a daily basis. We can’t give a figure but there are taxis that travel in and out of this province (Gauteng) to other provinces,” he said.
The South African Taxi Council said it too was concerned about the ban on long-distance travel.
Spokesperson Bafana Magagula said the industry would bleed money for the next two weeks. He said the industry employed around 300 000 drivers and created about a million jobs.
“Based on the pronouncement by the president, Gauteng is our bay for business. This is going to affect us negatively. We have been loading 70% and it doesn’t even cover the costs of the trips. It’s about time that government assists us without us having to fight,” Magagula said.
Malele said the NTA would not would not encourage taxi drivers to reduce the numbers of people in a taxi. Instead, they would encourage sanitising and other measures.
“If we were a super spreader, many people would be sick because we carry around 16 million people a day. Why should we suffer? We are black owned and we are put under pressure to reduce the load, so whose fooling who in the zoo.”
Malele said managing some protocols was hard because it was winter. Some passengers complained of the cold if windows were opened to allow for ventilation.
“The issue of windows is hard to manage as some people don’t want to open windows in the morning.
“We need the media to help us talk to people about the importance of ventilation,” Malele said, adding that the taxi industry had has been waiting with bated breath to be vaccinated urgently because of the “risky nature” of the public transport industry.
“We were the first to make the president aware that he made and error in not including us as front-line workers for the vaccination roll-out.
“So, they then said we should be inoculated with the queue marshals. We were the first to call a press conference during level five last year.”
IOL