Already separate regular forums to look at issues at the different ports have been scheduled – the first meeting was in Cape Town to coincide with the Maritime Conference in the city earlier this year. However, it appears ports have different issues rather than the same problems so they have to be handled individually, he explains. The next conference will be in Durban, where the problem still remains that of blockages and the inherent unwillingness of business to switch from road haulage to rail on the country’s most important road and rail corridor, that between Johannesburg and Durban. This is despite the announcement recently that Spoornet has laid on five daily dedicated freight trains north and southbound between Johannesburg and Durban. “Spoornet has talked of increased capacities because of the new trains but people are still not using them. It is of course early days, but we have no idea what sort of representation the company has made to try to lure customers to the new service. We as a business body could probably help in this campaign if the service proves itself. Durban is still plagued by blockages at the port, which will be a focus of our next maritime meeting in Durban,” he said. A further issue is the worrying decrease in the number of companies using the South African Revenue Service’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system for documentation between December and January. “The statistics reflect that in December 14% of manifests submitted to SARS from the shipping lines were electronic while in January 7% were submitted electronically. The implications of this are significant as we are trading with partners for whom electronic documentation is a norm, so we have scheduled urgent meetings between SARS and business to try to sort it out,” he said. Referring to the different export outlets for Gauteng, he lauded the efforts of the Mpumalanga Corridor which has developed a sophisticated and competitive alternative route to and from foreign markets. However, the road transport-dominated Gauteng-Beitbridge corridor still has goods taking up to four days to clear the border post into Zimbabwe which is unacceptable, he added.
