Anger meets optimism

As a new year dawns, I find myself facing the year ahead with a rather odd concoction of emotions: anger and optimism.

Let’s kick off with the anger. Like so many South Africans, I feel immense anger at load shedding. But I’m not even going to go there. It’s all been said and done. Adding my voice to those of millions of others isn’t going to achieve anything.

Maybe I won’t achieve anything with the second target of my anger either, but the issue is simply too important to our industry for me to ignore.

I am, of course, referring to the demise of Transnet. Recently, we posted a video on our social media channels of an endless queue of trucks waiting to offload at Richards Bay and – judging by the comments – there are many people in our industry who share my growing resentment.

When I watched that video, I felt extremely angry for the drivers, who are forced into a somewhat abusive situation (yes, I know many people will say that they choose to work as drivers… but what choice do they really have?)

I also felt angry for our economy. The queue is there thanks to Transnet… well, what is left of Transnet.

We need functional railways. We also desperately need to export whatever we can. There’s considerable international demand for coal but we’re not capitalising on this – purely because we cannot get the coal to the harbour.

Coal exports through the Richards Bay Coal Terminal dropped to about 50 million tonnes in 2022 for goodness‘ sake! That was the worst performance since 1993! The terminal’s annual export capacity is 91 million tonnes of coal…

This is a shameful, shocking, and totally unnecessary situation that is devastating our country and its people.

Of course, I’m not the only person with this belief. Many people share my concern about the impact on the drivers. Gert Vorster, a driver trainer and truck driver who recently emigrated, was one person who commented on the video. “Over and above keeping track of their duties and performing them with excellence, drivers need to be willing to do certain things most people would consider barbaric and gross,” Vorster pointed out.

“These drivers need to relieve themselves in the bush and – should they be spotted by the law – are charged with public indecency. They cook and sleep in their cab, sometimes in dangerous areas where they could be robbed and – even worse – get murdered. So, being a driver is not a walk in the park. Salute your drivers; what they are expected to do to keep you happy is just inhumane,” he lamented.

Talkingtrucks.co.za programme coordinator Hugh Sutherland also slammed the situation. “Just imagine what this does to vehicle utilisation and consequent loss of earnings! It’s my bet that these operators have little or no idea how much it is costing them! Next, are the vehicles’ engines running? If not, just think of electrical problems due to a few hundred starts before they reach the discharging point. Now, what happens when some trucks experience electrical problems? What puzzles me is that there are no backhaul earnings – so operators are certainly losing backhaul business. This is a disaster and soon there will be a glut of side tippers on the used lots!” he predicted.

What frustrates me is that this obviously isn’t a short-term problem that will be resolved anytime soon; the decay of our railways isn’t something that can be fixed overnight.

Onto the optimism

Okay, enough of me being angry. On a positive note, I was happy to see commercial vehicle sales for 2022 ending on a high. Yes, of course we came off a super low base, but the figures were very heartening indeed. A total of 135 666light commercial vehicles were sold – an increase of 2 589 vehicles, or 2% more than in 2021. The medium commercial vehicle market closed on 8 370, an increase of 850 vehicles, or 11.3% up on 2021. Finally, a total of 21 835 heavy commercial vehicles (trucks and buses) were sold – an increase of 2 280 vehicles, 11.7% up on 2021.

Want to know how the individual original equipment manufacturers fared? You can see the full breakdown in the accompanying table, courtesy of Lightstone/naamsa.