KOMBI OWNERS VOW TO REVERT TO 100% CAPACITY

MANZINI – Commuters should brace themselves today for fully loaded public service vehicles.

This follows a resolution that was taken by the Swaziland Local Transport Association (SLTA) yesterday. The National Chairperson of SLTA, Mandla Dlamini, said kombi owners had called for a meeting wherein they were seeking to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Currently, the coronavirus guidelines stipulate that public transport vehicles should be filled to 80 per cent of their capacity. This was brought about as means to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

However, this guideline seems to be rubbing the transport operators the wrong way as they agreed that they would no longer comply with it. Instead, Dlamini said they had resolved that they would revert to the capacity stipulated in their certificates of fitness.

Capacity

“The kombi owners said COVID-19 was a flu that we were living with but adhering to the 80 per cent capacity was no longer possible,” he said.

The transport operator said the biggest challenge they faced was that they had outstanding balances with their financiers and were due at the end of next month. He said with the current arrangement, many of the operators feared that they would lose their lifetime investments as they would be repossessed due to failure to comply with their obligations of servicing outstanding loans.

Dlamini said: “They also felt that in all the statistics that were issued by government on a daily basis, there had never been an instance when there was a case related to public transport.”

As a result, he said they had resolved to maintain the regulations in part. This would be through sanitising their vehicles and also making sure that every passenger in their vehicles had their hands sanitised before boarding.

To this, the Minister of Public Works and Transport, Chief Ndlaluhlaza Ndwandwe, said: “According to what I know, the regulations on the pandemic still stand. We appreciate the frustration transport operators together with other businesses are going through, but operations have to be in line with relevant guidelines in the respective operations.”

Guidelines

Also, Chief Police Information and Communications Officer Superintendent Phindile Vilakati said the police would continue to expect the guidelines to be followed as pronounced by government. She said: “If there are any changes, the right channels of communication would be used and we’ll heed to them.” Meanwhile, leading to the decision announced by public transport operators, government, when the partial lockdown was announced, ordered that public transport vehicles be filled up to 70 per cent capacity.

They were also directed to operate between 5am and 9am and resumed operations at 3pm until 7pm. They claimed to have taken a heavy blow from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown as they were losing 90 per cent of income each day.

The kombi owners said the negotiations for compensation from government would be of help, if the State were to extend a lifeline worth half of what they were losing each day.

Requirement

This is because the terms of the partial lockdown were to the effect that all kombis should not carry above 11 passengers, which is part of the social distancing measure that requires people to be a metre away from each other. 

In a previous article by our sister publication, Eswatini News, it was reported that Musa Dube, an owner of kombis operating between Manzini and Ntabamhloshana, said on a daily basis, after refuelling, each of his kombis were making between E800 and E1 000 on a busy day. 

Rough calculations show that each kombi rakes in about E20 000 per month. During the days of the lockdown, he said this had been greatly reduced to about E150 per day at most.

He said if government were to compensate local kombi owners, he would appreciate compensation of at least E10 000 for each kombi per month.

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