Same roads, same risks, same excuses

Anyone who has travelled to Thailand will know the phrase “same same but different”. I often feel the same about our industry – although spotting the differences is becoming increasingly difficult…

I recently stumbled across An investigation into road freight challenges faced by transport companies in South Africa, a dissertation submitted by Dennis Khuzwayo in partial fulfilment of an MBA degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was completed in 2018. That date is precisely what makes it so compelling – and so depressing.

Khuzwayo interviewed general managers and operations clerks working for road freight companies in Durban, Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their concerns were not vague or theoretical; they described the daily realities of moving goods through a system that repeatedly worked against them. 

A painfully familiar list

The study identified port congestion, poor road conditions, rising operating costs, theft, truck hijackings, deteriorating infrastructure, non-compliant vehicles, border delays, bribery, corruption and a shortage of skilled labour.

Read that list again. Now ask yourself honestly: how many of those problems have disappeared? There has been progress in certain areas. Government has introduced a Freight Logistics Roadmap, opened parts of the rail network to private operators and sought greater private-sector participation in rail and ports. Minister of Transport Barbara Creecyhas also repeatedly reported improvements in rail tonnage and container handling.

Those developments deserve recognition, but they do not erase the reality facing operators. Costs remain relentless, crime remains a serious threat, too many roads remain damaging and dangerous and border delays continue to destroy productivity.

The cost of standing still

These failures do not inconvenience transport companies alone. Every delay, breakdown, hijacking and unnecessary administrative obstacle eventually appears somewhere else – in the price of food, building materials, medicine, machinery or exports. Trucks do not merely serve the economy. In South Africa, they hold much of it together.

When freight rail underperforms, more cargo moves by road. That increases pressure on highways already carrying enormous volumes. When ports struggle, trucks queue. When border systems fail, vehicles, drivers and valuable loads stand idle. When law enforcement is weak or corrupt, compliant operators pay while criminals and rogue competitors flourish.

Khuzwayo’s dissertation warned that these pressures were causing financial losses and making it harder for transport companies to meet clients’ requirements. Eight years later, that warning still hits home with uncomfortable force.

We know what must be done

What struck me most was not only Khuzwayo’s diagnosis, but his proposed remedies. He called for genuine public-private cooperation, better policing, action against non-compliant trucks, skills development, improved Transnet productivity and relief from escalating diesel costs.

None of this is revolutionary. That is the point. South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of reports, roadmaps, committees, conferences or recommendations, but from a shortage of consistent implementation and accountability.

The freight sector has shown extraordinary resilience – investing in technology, security, training and equipment while navigating conditions it did not create. But resilience must never become an excuse for government failure. Operators cannot indefinitely compensate for broken infrastructure, weak enforcement and inefficient state systems.

A successful freight system also demands coordinated government action. Transport, policing, trade, energy and infrastructure cannot continue operating in separate silos while trucks lose hours at borders, operators absorb avoidable costs and South Africa’s competitiveness slips further behind its trading partners.

Khuzwayo’s dissertation deserves to be read today, not because it predicted the future, but because it captured problems we already understood in 2018. The real question is not what went wrong. We know what went wrong. The question is why, after eight years, so much still feels exactly the same… not even “same same but different”.