Billions in taxpayer money spent, a few enriched beyond their wildest dreams by corruption and theft, and the majority who were meant to benefit no better off than they were before. It’s the familiar South African story of an expensive and grandiose project that promised much, but delivered little, its ambitious goals sunk under the deadweight of misgovernance and illicit enrichment.
This is the sad story of the government’s much-vaunted Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system, which was meant to revolutionise public transport in our cities.
As we reported last week, spending of R55bn on the BRT system in cities and metros has in most cases been a colossal waste of public funds.
Beyond the usual culprits such as corruption, mismanagement and wasteful expenditure, the failure is being blamed on a “lack of political will”, which is shorthand for the failure of governments at all levels to tackle the powerful matrix of interests of the taxi bosses and their accomplices in public office.
Looking back over 16 years of failure, transport department spokesperson Collen Msibi bemoaned “ongoing instances of governance spending failures leading to wastage, mismanagement and inefficiency”.
Of the 13 municipalities funded by the scheme, only eight are said to have partially operational BRT systems. In Johannesburg, Tshwane and Cape Town they have been partly successful. In most other cases all there is to show is infrastructure that is hardly used, sometimes with roads refashioned in such a way as to be of even less use as a public transport asset than they were in the past. Consultants have been the biggest winners.
Apart from financial mismanagement, the authorities appear to have vastly miscalculated the reaction of taxi bosses to the scheme, which is largely an imported idea that worked well in cities in Brazil, where presumably the taxi industry subjects itself to the laws of the country, which is not the case here.
Given our claim to prefer indigenous and home-grown solutions, it seems odd that the taxi industry appears to have been an afterthought in the grand calculations.
It’s back to the drawing board for the BRT. That which can be salvaged must be made to work for commuters. For the rest, it is high time that reality was faced and the spending taps closed to ensure there is no further waste of funds. The “political will’’ must be found to acknowledge the realities on the ground.
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