Cape hauliers call for action from Sapo

RAY SMUTS ENOUGH IS enough. Members of the Cape Town Harbour Carriers' Association are frustrated and angry at the uncompromising stance of South African Port Operations in dealing with the many unresolved problems at the container terminal. It’s not likely to be the sort of subject matter Sapo would readily discuss for media consumption but Alison Muller, chairperson of the nine-month-old association, last week produced more than a fistful of grievances about intransigence in the port. Transporters, like shipping carriers, are dependent on swift turnabout times to maintain demanding schedules but this is simply not happening at CTCT, asserts an exasperated Muller. “The grower cannot afford to pay for the port’s inefficiency and we cannot afford to strike, so it’s a catch-22 situation and I firmly believe the problem lies with management. “If you phone them (and they indeed respond), they never seem to know what is going on. Only then will they go down and investigate what is going on in the port. “Management should know what is going on in their port and if Oscar Borchards (container terminal business unit manager) has a resource problem then Maria must help him.” (Maria Ramos is CEO of Transnet, parent of Sapo). Muller is marketing and administrative manager for Muller Steel Hauliers, which puts around 13 000 full export TEUs and 27 000 empty TEUs through the terminal a year. She says whereas she has costed her trucks to take one hour offload/load, in reality it takes an average of three hours to get through the port. The truck is continuously burning diesel, which is at an all time high at present, from the time it arrives until the time it departs from the port. The driver is also not allowed to leave his truck so access to toilet and food facilities is hindered for the drivers. The litany of woes by the Harbour Carriers' Association includes: • The unilateral decision by Sapo to close (from August) the port for container acceptance between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. with only one week’s notification prior to implementation. • Inadequate access to the port and poor staffing, often only one person manning a two-lane entrance for P-(physical) checks of container loads, or two men manning a one-lane entrance, which not only makes for congestion on a grand scale but considerably retards vehicle turnaround times. • The unwillingness by Sapo to differentiate between import and export stacks at high volume stacking area, leading to even more delays. • Poor telephone etiquette by senior management. Calls are often simply not returned. Colin Schultz, distribution manager for SANSFibres, one of the container terminal’s largest customers with up to 10 000 export TEUs annually, believes nothing is new to the problems experienced by transporters. “They have basically always been there but simply become worse from time to time. These problems should be highlighted and the guys in the port brought to task on this; it’s now getting ridiculous.” The problems have been acknowledged and Sapo told FTW that they would be responding to the industry.