Call for ‘vote of no confidence’ in DCT management

The battle at the Durban container terminals has now reached a pitch, with demands for an urgent indaba between the leader of this country’s forwarding and freight body and the top man at Transnet. This because the port remains completely logjammed, and the landside freight industry feels that the fault remains with Transnet's poor workforce productivity and management’s failure to remedy this. The call at high level is for the national chairman of the SA Association of Freight Forwarders (Saaff), Basil Pietersen, to put before Transnet acting CEO, Chris Wells, “a vote of no-confidence in the ability of Durban Container Terminal (DCT) management to identify, address and rectify the causes of the diabolical performance of DCT landside”. We have noted the service levels have been unacceptable. This has been due to high stack occupancy. To deal with this we have added 840 ground slots. This intervention will help us create fluidity in our stacks. In our monthly meeting we will share some ideas of how we plan to have some even distribution of work in all towers. Have you looked at the landside performance of DCT over the past several days? There is no other word to describe it other than “pathetic”. Have you also looked at the stack utilisation and the level of transhipments? Obviously our discussions at our monthly meetings are falling on deaf ears. You are favouring the shipping lines at the expense of the South African importer and exporter and at the same time doing a good job of putting the local transport industry out of business, unless we are able to raise a “DCT poor performance surcharge” on our customers. Unless remedial action is taken immediately we will have no choice but to canvas our membership with a view to requesting the national chairman of Saaff to put forward to the Transnet CEO a vote of no confidence in the ability of DCT management to identify, address and rectify the causes of the diabolical performance of DCT landside. We have been backlogged with work for the past two days, creating major problems with our customers. We get accused of not being able to handle their deliveries on time and creating overtime when there is no explanation for this. Frankly customers are tired of hearing the same excuse that the port is congested all the time. We have had drivers for the past three days sitting for as long as 10 hours at a time to pick up containers. Not only are the drivers getting frustrated, they also get very tired and restless, where they become stumped from carrying out their duties. At the moment I’m sure that not just us but all the transport companies are currently running at a loss which needs to be rectified. The port cannot get away every time with the problems that they cause throughout SA and around the world giving us a bad name. We as the transporters, which are the most important link in the chain, need to come together as one so that we can be heard. These delays that have been caused over the past few days are still not resolved. TPT still has not notified us of the problems they are having. The six-hour extension they are giving us merely creates more overtime costs.