From chaos to control: Why SA must digitalise
From chaos to control: Why SA must digitalise
South Africa’s transport and logistics systems are collapsing under poor data, weak regulation and corruption. NICK PORÉE says true accountability begins with digitalisation – the only route back to discipline and efficiency.
The announcement that South Africa’s government intends to engage in the digitisation of official processes is good news. Much of the existing chaos in the management of government functions might have been averted had there been effective monitoring systems that reported all deviations accurately and transparently. Failure to record, analyse and expose data has led to poor management and supported endemic corruption in many departments, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and municipalities; truly, “If you can’t (or don’t) measure it, you can’t manage it”.
The recent revelations by Professor William Gumede explain the parlous state of the economy and the urgent need to regain control and discipline in government. Digitalisation of transactions provides the foundation for accountability.
In the 1980s, when the road freight industry was deregulated, the director general of the Department of Transport (DoT), Adriaan Eksteen, appointed Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) to design the regulatory system to manage the rapidly expanding road freight industry. A later political decision transferred the design of the Road Transport Quality System (RTQS) to civil engineers who focused on the National Road Traffic Act (NRTA) and included an unworkable operator dimension with no defined regulatory system or managing authority. Control of commercial operator fitness and responsible persons was scrapped, and traffic regulation was focused on road signs, vehicles and drivers.
The legalists had minimal appreciation of commercial activities, transport technology or international best practice, and did not include a means of responding to the rapidly changing equipment and conditions in the industry. The abrogation of control by the DoT to the very expensive but ineffective Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) for the past 25 years has merely perpetuated the conflation of private and commercial vehicle operations and precluded quality control of industrial transport.
It is critical that commercial transport is monitored, due to the inevitable creation of externalities. The system must identify problem areas, trends and factors affecting efficiency, safety and compliance with standards. In South Africa, there has been a 40-year lament about the lack of data on road freight transport, but nothing has been done about it, leaving many key aspects of the national transport sector in need of review, restructuring and regulatory overhaul. The recommendations of the Road Freight Strategy approved by Cabinet in 2017 have been totally ignored.
When engaging with countries with international standards of reporting, it is evident that we are running 40 years behind best practice, over-legislated and under-regulated. This is reflected in the costs and externalities such as road safety, driver proficiency, vehicle condition, ineffective enforcement and criminal activities. In the US, UK, EU and Australia, digital records and monitoring are key to maintaining discipline, managing compliance, honing operator efficiencies and eliminating wasteful and destructive actions.
In South Africa, there are serious design flaws and deficiencies in the management and control of transport operations by authorities. There are about 500,000 commercial vehicles (CVs) of various sizes and an estimated 180,000 operators, 75% of which are one- to two-vehicle owners (both hauliers and own account). There are very evident quality problems at the zero level of GDP growth, and if there is to be a revival of the economy through increased manufacturing, agriculture and mining, it will expand the road freight system proportionally.
It is therefore imperative that the operational quality monitoring and control systems are modernised and made fit for purpose before attempting to digitise them. This process requires industry expertise and appreciation of global best practice in order to prepare South Africa for a future with significant expansion of a well-regulated transport framework. This is doubly important due to the current direction of railway reconstruction, with its focus on homogenous trainload bulk transport of minerals. The lack of digitalisation as it applies to commercial transport can be described as follows.
Commercial Road Freight Operator Registration and Monitoring
There is no commercial transport operator training in South Africa, as the practical transport management courses offered for 20 years at RAU have been deindustrialised into academic curricula, while the Transport Education and Training Authority (TETA) systems are not effective. The industry problem, therefore, is that a large proportion of operators have no training, experience or registration before entering the market. There is no barrier to entry to the industry, as the current NRTA does not include admission procedures. It is also totally ineffective in identifying accountable persons or repeat offenders, due to disaggregated enforcement and the lack of systematic data recording and monitoring.
In developed countries, aspirant transport operators are examined for knowledge, experience and sufficient resources prior to registration and licensing, to give assurance of meeting legal standards of operating quality. All details of their past or proposed operations must be disclosed (vehicles, drivers, premises, maintenance location). Adequately trained Responsible Competent Persons (RCPs) must be nominated to take personal responsibility for each operating centre. The digital process is controlled by a National Transport Registrar or similar office; all infringement information is digitalised and operators are required to submit monthly returns of key information, which is recorded, analysed and mined for evidence of non-compliance.
The authority applies evidence-based warnings and sanctions that do not rely on courts of law and are therefore effective in achieving compliance. All commercial freight vehicles, drivers and operators are included in this surveillance, and repeat offenders face immediate, effective and possibly drastic corporate sanctions by the registrar.
In South Africa, we do not even know how many operators there are, or details regarding their vehicles, drivers or businesses. No operator has been banned from the present system for the past 40 years.
Vehicle testing station system
The South African Certificate of Roadworthiness (CoR) inspection system has serious design flaws and a lack of monitoring and control, as well as being badly corrupted throughout the country. The basic problem is that no person can be held accountable for vehicle condition because the system’s lack of digital monitoring does not identify the qualification (or even the identity) of whoever prepared the vehicles for CoR. Roadside inspections lack technical resources and are not digitally linked to the vehicle repairers; no records of repairs are kept.
It must also be recognised that annual testing of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) is ineffective in controlling vehicle quality, as regular maintenance and repairs are core processes in the management of transport. The inability to identify operators and hold them to account is the major reason for the 60% of defective vehicles on the roads.
It would be a waste of time to digitise the existing system without a complete overhaul, regulation changes and the introduction of effective management. The UK Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency’s systems offer exemplary efficiency and effectiveness that SA could emulate.
Motor vehicle registration and monitoring system
The eNaTIS database, holding details of around 12 million vehicles, has a dubious history of poor management. It is clogged with historical errors and data and is badly corrupted by hijacking cartels. This has been reported and acknowledged by the local vehicle insurers’ association and the international security publication Servamus. The covert secrecy of the system, meanwhile, has contributed to its malfunctions. Effective digitalisation of the registration and processing of vehicle data will require transfer to blockchain or other secure technology and the introduction of data mining and transparent reporting systems by a competent agency.
Driver training and registration system
CV driver training lacks any measure of professional competence. Training is a “cottage industry” without resources, curricula, standards or qualifications, and is based solely on passing the K53 driving test overseen by traffic officials who are widely corrupted. HGV trainees are taught on “mini trucks” and are not trained or assessed on loaded, modern, large freight vehicles. They are therefore released onto public roads (at the age of 18!) to gain experience and competence.
The Professional Driver Permit (PDP) is a joke. I know this because I designed it, but only part was implemented. It is simply a bureaucratic procedure with no relevance to professionalism. The impacts on road safety are increasingly evident and a system overhaul with a digital database is urgently needed. In advanced economies, driver training is a profession requiring qualifications; driver training schools are registered and issue certified examination marks as evidence of competence for licensing to drive. The minimum age for HGV trainees in Australia is 21, to begin progressive experience under tuition.
Road transport accident recording and monitoring system
Most road traffic accidents are recorded at the scene by South African Police Service (SAPS) officers and sometimes traffic officials. The official accident recording (AR) report form is a formidable document comprising four A4 pages and 98 questions. The form was designed by academics at the National Institute for Traffic and Transport (NITRR) in the 1980s. Completing the document is an impossible task for an officer at an accident scene with vehicles and bodies strewn all over it. The officer needs to control traffic, avoid further damage, assist the injured and recover vehicles (often at night or in mist or rain).
The provincial departments of transport gather the partially completed forms from SAPS stations and manually enter the data into a computer system. Data capture is usually under-resourced and often involves loading data that is some years old.
Our last survey showed that only 30% of the AR form is filled in with any consistency, and many questions are simply ignored. The incomplete data is sent to the RTMC, but as most provincial records are out of date, it is not possible to produce an accurate, current accident analysis. Road safety management (the primary mandate of the RTMC) is ill-informed and virtually non-existent. The national fatality rate of 22 per 100,000 population is likely to be grossly understated.
Road safety education
The level of road safety education and exposure in South Africa is inadequate to effect any improvement. There are 24,850 schools, 13.5 million scholars, and about 45 million adults in South Africa who are potential recipients of effective digital marketing of the road safety message. International best practice includes far more evidence-based pictorial, video and verbal messages via social and other media, with sufficient impact to influence public behaviour as drivers, pedestrians and passengers. The inclusion of detailed analysis of the trends in current accident statistics, by vehicle and accident categories, is an essential element of effective communication.
Digital marketing will permit widespread exposure to, and more effective communication of, the road safety message. It is noteworthy that the RTMC ignores all the prerequisites for road safety: driver training, vehicle condition, public education, data recording and accident analysis, commercial operator compliance, enforcement capability and corruption, among others. Instead, it has developed a complicated, draconian penalty system called the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (AARTO) Act, which is presumed to frighten offenders into compliance but does not address the causes of the problem and is likely to increase the level of corruption and expensive litigation.
Vehicle load monitoring system
In South Africa, the control of overloading of goods vehicles is often quoted as the essential activity to maintain road quality. This fixation disregards the realities of the road maintenance system and its relationship to current road freight activities. The de facto situation is that most roads were built over 50 years ago to much lower design standards than current legislation; the volume of traffic has doubled; tyres have changed from cross-ply to steel-belt radials; vehicle size and legal axle loads were significantly increased in the 1990s; and the lack of funding at all levels is aggravated by a rapid reduction of technical competence in road management. The present system of enforcement depends on one-off fines issued by traffic officers and is riddled with corruption and collusion.
The system is premised on incorrect principles and at variance with commercial logic. The effectiveness of enforcement is based on the principles of probability: (a) of being apprehended; (b) of being fined; and (c) the cost of the fine. The combined probabilities are balanced with the profitability of contravention. The current system is so fraught with possibilities for avoidance that overloading can be pursued with impunity; operators maximise profits through avoidance and, if necessary, collusion. The largest tonnages of long-haul road freight move at night (when there is no weighing activity) to avoid traffic and optimise turnaround efficiency. The lack of an integrated system makes it impossible to identify levels of contravention and, consequently, the avoidance strategies of individual operators.
The overload system needs a complete overhaul, with modernisation and digitalisation of data into an effective monitoring system using weigh-in-motion and number plate recognition technology. This should be expanded to reduce manpower, eliminate officer-to-operator contact and monitor traffic at many more points on major roads. The output from the system should be reported to the Road Transport Registrar, which would apply sanctions to identified repeat offenders outside of the judicial system. The seeds of such a system have been planted in KwaZulu-Natal with electronic monitoring and data collection. However, the heterogeneous nature of the large traffic volumes and the lack of a national enforcement agency limit its effectiveness to a few routes, as shown in the comprehensive annual provincial report.
Cross-Border Permit System
The control of cross-border traffic in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is based on 1920s assumptions of quantity regulation of interstate trade, as described in the badly outdated SADC Protocol on Road Transport, Communications and Meteorology (PTCM). The terms are repeated in the bilateral agreements between the member states and controlled by a permit system which has no useful function, yet adds cost to interstate trade (R250 million/year for South Africa). In 2012, a report on the impacts of the system was presented to the 27 SADC member states and Tripartite Alliance in Johannesburg. The report explained the futility of attempts at controlling the quantity of trade, which is determined by industrial demand, and recommended the redirection of cross-border control to a quality-based system that would include operator registration and digital monitoring of compliance. This was accepted, and the EU volunteered to provide €20 million to fund the development.
The project, named the Tripartite Transport and Trade Facilitation Programme (TTTFP), was awarded to a South African IT company with a SADC Project Management Unit (PMU). The project proceeded to expand and diversify its mandate into traffic harmonisation and the development of legislation based on South African traffic regulations (including all their shortcomings).
After 10 years of expending the initial budget, the project appears to have stalled without results, but is still being promoted. The permit system is therefore still in place; it should be scrapped, and the Cross-Border Road Transport Agency (C-BRTA) disbanded or repurposed into a Transport Registration Agency (as recommended to the DoT some years ago).
Digitalisation capacity
From all of the foregoing descriptions of the functions in South Africa’s road transport and logistics industries, there are evident deficiencies in the fields of data management, digitalisation and modern technology. South Africa will face significant challenges in rising to the need for professional competence in digital system development and operation, due to the very apparent limitations in the education of a large proportion of the population. South Africa has a severe skills disadvantage when compared to countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, India, China, Singapore and the US.
There is therefore an urgent need for a total revision of the system of preparing workers for industrial employment. This should involve scrapping the Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) system and creating industry-focused, public-private partnership (PPP) education centres with joint funding by government and industries. It will require the import of technical teaching expertise and the restructuring of the education system to re-establish international standards of examination and competence.
The focus on irrelevant university degrees should be replaced by industrial training and mentoring, with curricula and standards to meet global levels of innovation and graduate competence. It is essential that this process is driven by industries, as the existing education authorities and practitioners are not responsive to the needs of modern industrial practices and cannot be expected to understand the implications of modern technology and innovation in the complex world of business.
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