Deadly protests erupt over Cape Town taxi strike

Issued on: 10/08/2023 – 16:34

4 min

Shocking videos of buses on fire and civilian cars being hit with stones are circulating online following a taxi strike in Cape Town that has stretched on for more than a week.

The South African National Taxi Council (SANTACO) announced a one-week regional strike on August 3 after local authorities passed a law that allows them to impound vehicles violating technical and legal requirements. 

The minibuses run by taxi companies are an essential mode of transportation for most South African commuters. Over 80% of public transportation users depend on taxis to get to their workplace, according to the national statistics agency. 

Taxi companies protested the law by blockading highways around Cape Town, keeping local buses and civilians from circulating in and out of the city. 

In the early days of the strike, workers from townships surrounding Cape Town were forced to sleep in bus stations, fight their way onto overcrowded buses or make their way through traffic jams on foot. 

Protesters torched police cars, taxis, buses and civilian cars alike. Some videos show them attacking civilian vehicles with stones. So far at least five people have died in the protests.

‘Violence affects the very people that support the taxi industry, the commuters’

While taxi drivers try to put pressure on the authorities to revoke the legislation allowing them to seize vehicles, working class people living in the townships around Cape Town are the most affected by their actions.

Geoff Mamputa, an independent mediator who has been working on the taxi conflicts in the Western Cape for years, told the FRANCE 24 Observers team how everyday people are being instrumentalised in the protests.  

If [the taxi drivers] stop these people that are providing essential services, they effectively stop the economy of Cape Town from functioning. It’s a way of putting pressure on the authorities. This only affects people in townships which is the unintentional aspect of it. Violence is being done against the very people that support the taxi industry, the commuters that use them to get to work. They are the ones that are suffering the most right now. The taxi drivers should take their anger against the State, not against the commuters.

Because of the central role of taxis in public transportation, rivalries between different companies are common and sometimes descend into violence to the detriment of commuters.   

‘The authorities are very reluctant to build working class housing within the town’

The taxi strike has had such an immense impact on Cape Town residents due to racialised urban planning that has continued even after the end of the apartheid in South Africa in 1994.

During apartheid, Black communities were deliberately banished from cities, but Mamputa explains that the high accommodation prices within the city perpetuate the same type of segregation. 

Most townships are at least 5 km away from Cape Town so these people are dependent on public transport. The authorities are very reluctant to build working class housing within the town. They are perpetuating the old apartheid way of planning. So people are being pushed out of town. Communities are not integrated. So you get different segregated communities: the White people, people who are mixed race, the Black, the Indian…

I was born in the city, but my family was pushed away by these policies. We moved and my father had to leave at 4am to get to work at 7:30am.

Now, commuters are forced to stay at home or walk considerable distances to get to work.  

My cousin walked from Woodstock in Cape Town all the way to Gugulethu. It’s 20 to 25 kilometres away. But she could not use the highway because it was blocked, she had to go through other suburbs. She left work at 4:30pm and arrived home at 8:45pm.

‘The taxi strikes became a political campaign’

So far discussions between the local politicians and SANTACO have had no results. The local councillor in charge of safety and security, JP Smith, threatened to “proceed with impounding 25 vehicles for every truck, bus, vehicle or facility that is burnt or vandalised” during the ongoing protests. 

While the national South African law on transportation allows public transport vehicles to be impounded for breaching licence conditions, taxi drivers claim that the current crackdown is overblown. 

The local Cape Town government has put together an ambitious public transport development plan to be implemented between 2023 and 2028 which would potentially diminish the central role of taxis in favour of trains and buses. Mamputa says that the authorities “have to get rid of the taxis” to implement their plan, which might be one of the underlying reasons for the crackdown.  

The South African Transport Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga said on August 8 the actions of Cape Town officials are beyond the law. With national elections taking place next year, Mamputa says that the taxi strikes have been turned into a political opportunity. The current governing party, the African National Congress, which has been in power since the end of apartheid, is strongly opposing the leading party in Western Cape, the Democratic Alliance (DA), a party which emerged after apartheid when a number of liberal, predominantly White parties merged. 

There are national elections this year so the whole situation became a political campaign. This is beyond taxis. Because Cape Town is run by a different party, the DA, which is a traditional White party, these ideological differences are now coming to a fall.

Despite the declared end date of the strike being August 10, the Taxi Council announced the continuation of the shutdown in the absence of a productive dialogue with the local authorities.