It is 8am on Tuesday and Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane is about to appeal to the patriotic side of the taxi industry.
To his surprise, captains of the sector are logged into the Zoom meeting on time and are ready to hear what he, safety and security MEC Weziwe Tikana-Gxothiwe and provincial administration boss Mbulelo Sogoni have to say.
Heavy hitters are here — SA National Taxi Association (Santaco) provincial secretary Mtutuzeli Madwara, Santaco provincial deputy chair Gebs Mtshali, Border Alliance Taxi Association president Songezo Mpanda and the Eastern Cape Taxi Association’s Zonomzi Gqebenya.
Mabuyane understood that if the province was to prevent the type of looting and wanton destruction seen in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, he would need taxi bosses in his corner.
In an interview on Thursday, the premier told how everyone in the meeting was “agitated that this nonsense must be stopped”.
“They [taxi bosses] needed leadership and we provided that leadership by telling them how to go about it by not breaking the law,” Mabuyane said.
For his administration, there needed to be “thinking out-of-the-box” if law and order were to be maintained, as policing agencies had failed to do this in other parts of the country.
What was required was buy-in from businesses and communities.
Because taxi operators and industry members had already formed human shields to protect shops and businesses on Monday, in less than an hour all parties agreed that destruction and looting would not be tolerated in the Eastern Cape.
Mabuyane appealed to the taxi industry’s “patriotic sense of responsibility”, emphasising that lawlessness would be bad for business which was already struggling under lockdowns.
“If you burn malls, you are destroying their business because there would be no-one to transport to malls.
“We had to make that one clear,” Mabuyane said.
“It was not about the government asking them to help us.
“They understood it’s about national responsibility and everyone should defend against the criminality we saw in other parts of the country.”
The bosses reassured Mabuyane they were ready to defend businesses as a way of “apologising for all the terrible we have done”.
Often painted as villains for dangerous driving and bringing cities to a standstill whenever aggrieved, taxi operators have emerged as heroes in the Eastern Cape while unrest flared up in other parts of the country.
Under their watch, no shops have been looted, particularly in Nelson Mandela Bay.
“We made this call that we have not recovered from what was called umgidi ka [former Ciskei homeland leader Lennox] Sebe when we were taking down the homeland government [in 1990],” Mabuyane said.
“Sections burnt down in Dimbaza, Fort Jackson and Mdantsane were destroyed.
“Investors ran away and they never came back.
“We were telling our people that we cannot be repeating the story of Nongqawuse with our eyes wide open because when you destroy what you have with the hope that you’re going to wake up with something better is a story of Nongqawuse,” he said.
Nongqawuse was a Xhosa seer who advised if the Xhosa slaughtered all their cattle, the European settlers would be driven out by their ancestors.
This led to a great famine in 1856 and 1857, with the Xhosa nation suffering immensely.
Mabuyane said the level of patriotism displayed not only by the taxi industry but religious leaders and residents in general in defending businesses was something that “we will forever be grateful for”.
Mabuyane hopes the co-operation is the start of good things to come, and the provincial government will continue to engage the sector to ensure issues are addressed before they descend into chaos.
Some critics have argued that the alliance between the government and the taxi industry could result in a situation where the state is held to ransom, and operators would hold their defence of businesses over Bhisho’s head.
But Mabuyane said this criticism was unfair.
“Those are people who will forever have something negative to say.”
When he met operators in Ngcobo on Wednesday, it became clear they were not protecting businesses as “blackmail” but out of serious concern for them.
“It is not a case of impressing the government but a collective effort arising out of mutual interest.
“The government has an interest of normality for the economic growth of the economy and they have an interest for their business.”
Mabuyane said the notion that the taxi industry was run by thugs should be rejected out of hand.
“These are business people who have raised their children by transporting people from point A to point B for years.”
The collaboration would go a long way in addressing the trust deficit that existed, he said.
Madwara said when taxi bosses received a call from the provincial government, they had already decided to protect businesses.
Ensuring law and order was a no-brainer for the industry as some taxi owners had their vehicles repossessed by banks when they could not meet their financial obligations because of the lockdown.
“People know that the majority of us are at a disadvantage in terms of education and that if we allow what we have built to be destroyed, we will have nowhere else to go because most of us are unemployable,” he said.
“There’s no political influence or influence from the government.
“Our position is to defend our bread.
“We don’t have the financial muscle to plough back to our communities so we felt strongly that by doing this thing we would say sorry for the many terrible things we have done.
“It was high time that we did something right here in the Eastern Cape.”
To accusations that they would hold their good act over the government, Madwara said: “Our intentions are pure like water streaming down a river stream.
“We don’t have any intentions that tomorrow we will gunpoint the government.”
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