Taxi drivers are becoming increasingly frustrated with town shutdowns, as they count the cost of lost business. The last shutdown, which took place on February 24, took them by surprise.
Usually, said a group of taxi drivers to the media, they are informed in advance but this was not the case with the recent shutdown. The situation has left them angry and bitter.
Spokesperson for the group of taxi drivers, Vusi Ndlovu explained how during the recent shutdown, traffic had come to a standstill because of protest action on the KwaMathukuza road. Motorists from Osizweni had to take the long way around, diverting through Madadeni and travelling along the Asiphephe Bridge to get work in Newcastle.
“If there’s going to be a protest – a legal protest – we are informed in time. That’s what happened with the first shutdown last year in September. Often we wonder what the point is waking up for work, because even if we pick up passengers, these ‘illegal protests’ prevent us from taking them to town. That’s a day’s business gone down the drain and no one bothered to inform us,” said one of the exasperated drivers.
Ndlovu further explained, “It is our time and money wasted. We wake up for work, fill our taxi’s petrol tank at our own cost, then look for a full load of passengers. If I get to KwaMathukuza and the road is closed, I have to turn back and deliver the passengers back to where I collected them from and pay them back their money.”
Their calculations are as follows: “One load of passengers from Osizweni is around R300. I can probably do about two or three loads a day. That’s about R600 a day. With that R600, I must fill the taxi with petrol, I must eat during the day, I must make sure the taxi is clean and washed. That’s another R300 gone. What’s left, you take to the manager, they take their percentage, and you get paid what’s left. We get paid weekly. After the percentage is taken, you’ll probably end up with R200 for the day, so by the end of the week, it’s probably R1 000, making it R5 000 a month, depending on how many loads and how hard you work over the weekend too.”
The taxi drivers said they were barely covering their living expenses such as school fees and household needs. Yet the taxi industry is not the only economic sector hit hard by shutdowns.
Read the full story in this week’s edition of the Newcastle Advertiser.
ALSO READ: Newcastle ‘shutdown’ – here’s what we know so far
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