‘SA must rise to the occasion logistically’

South Africa must gear up to increase its trade with Africa by facilitating and enabling easier commerce, said Deputy Minister of Transport Jeremy Cronin. Cronin told FTW that Africa was the third most dynamic growth region in the world at present, but only 10% of Africa’s current trade was within Africa. “At least 90% of the continent’s trade goes the old colonial ways. South Africa, as a member of BRICS, has an important role to play as the gateway into Africa,” said Cronin. “We are in talks with SADC, the East African Community and Comesa to look at how we can move to a Customs-effective programme in the region to bring about easier trade conditions.” He said with discussions around developing a north south corridor from the Cape to Cairo, Minister Trevor Manuel had been tasked with assessing the situation and ensuring South Africa played the vitally important role it needed to in the formulation of the programmes. “The World Bank 2010 Global Competitiveness report rated SA 28 out of 55 countries so we are no doubt holding our own when it comes to our logistics capacity,” said Cronin, but he warned against complacency. “We must stay ahead of the game otherwise countries like China will find other ways of gaining entry into Africa. It is time that we in government realise that we have an asset and resource in our logistics system despite being geographically challenged.” With the bulk of the country’s trade being seaborne, South Africa remains far from its markets which impacts on exports and imports – and with the industrial heartland more than 500km away from the nearest port, logistics costs remain a concern. “Our logistics costs make up 14.7% of GDP compared to the US where they are only 9%,” said Cronin. “We need to rise to the occasion and that is why the DoT is reviewing the national freight logistics strategy that was first released in 2005.” Cronin said not only had funding for the maintenance of transport infrastructure been woefully inadequate but timeous interventions had not taken place either, resulting in a major maintenance backlog especially on the secondary road network. “We have succeeded in securing some R20 billion for the next three years but it will not be enough. We need to look at finding ways of securing more money for road maintenance and ring-fencing it to make sure that it goes where it is needed.” He said the DoT was also committed to seeing freight migrate from road to rail “We are not trying to kill roadfreight business, but we have too much freight on road. Our solution is an intermodal system where the correct freight is being transported by the correct mode. “At present road continues to take more and more freight. This situation cannot continue. Specific cargo like coal has to stay on rail.”