As South Africa marks Transport Month, a Sunday Independent editorial argues that the country still underplays how much daily life depends on minibus taxis. Sandile Mdadane, an executive editor at the National Media Group, says about 15 million people use the mode each day and that stayaways quickly freeze work, school and hospital trips.
The piece is opinion, not a new government announcement. Its core claim is that taxis are too central to treat as a side issue, and that recognition has to come with higher safety and accountability.
Why the industry is hard to ignore
Mdadane traces the sector from apartheid-era gaps in formal transport, through 1980s deregulation that helped black-owned taxi businesses expand, to violent route competition and associations that sometimes enforced their own rules beyond the state’s reach. Democracy inherited a system that was indispensable, entrepreneurial, fragmented and hard to regulate.
He stresses a point often blurred in public argument: minibus taxis do public-transport work, but they are privately owned businesses. Government transport papers have long noted that the industry historically received no direct operational subsidy, while the Taxi Recapitalisation Programme offered capital help by scrapping old vehicles.
That gap matters when operators are told to deliver an essential service while carrying private financial risk. The same tension is live now: SANTACO has warned that rising fuel and running costs may push individual associations to review fares, and is again calling for more equitable public-transport support.
Fleet renewal and unfinished reform
The editorial says the Taxi Recapitalisation Programme began in 2006 to get unsafe old taxis off the road. Official figures match its later numbers: by the end of September 2018, government said 72,653 old taxis had been scrapped and about R4.4 billion paid in allowances. The scrapping allowance was later raised to R124,000 under the revised programme.
Mdadane says reviews found familiar obstacles: the cost of new vehicles, the size of the allowance, and illegal operations. E-hailing competition has added another pressure. The Revised Taxi Recapitalisation Programme has also been framed as more than scrap-and-replace, taking in commercialisation and formalisation.
Space, ranks and the rules of the road
The editorial argues city design still reflects apartheid geography, with many people living far from jobs and too few proper ranks, loading bays and safe drop-offs. That does not excuse reckless driving, overloading or illegal stops when safer options exist, it says: an essential service is not above the law.
Mdadane’s closing bargain is two-sided. If government expects taxis to act as public transport, it must face the real cost of that role, including funding models that may bring taxis into wider support. If operators want recognition and integration, they must accept licensing, safety and professional standards. “It cannot be a one-way street.”
Related research makes a similar point from another angle: University of Fort Hare researcher Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi argues that calling the industry “informal” can hide the organisation already inside it, and that formalisation fails when it ignores that knowledge.