Industry questions port planning vision

Ray Smuts QUESTIONS HAVE been raised about the existence of a national master plan for all South Africa's ports in the light of the current crisis. "Do the port authorities actually have a footprint indicating where they are headed?" asks Brett Gray, managing director of Southern Africa Transport Investments (S.A.T.I.) On the imminent expansion in the Port of Durban, he believes there is no guarantee that the port will not again become congested even before the project is complete. "Durban has had a number of plans around for a decade but we are not aware of what NPA's (National Port Authority's) plans are, and decisions are becoming critical. "We are not ahead of the game in terms of having developed South African ports in order to handle growth," says Gray. "That is the case in Durban where the approval of R1,3 billion for further development will only come on stream two years from now. "In Cape Town, we find all of a sudden we are unable to handle the volumes - another example of not being ahead of the game - and we should have been in a situation that when the ports are 65% utilised a plan is in place which includes all completed impact studies." Once building operations begin, there's a further problem of disruption to operations in both the Durban and Cape Town container terminals during the upgrade. "Both are already near capacity so can you imagine the difficulty we are going to be in?"