Can Zuma untie Gordian knot after failing to quash corruption charges?

South Africa’s president faces a difficult time ahead, following the loss of his bid to escape justice.
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The Supreme Court of South Africa’s rejection of President Jacob Zuma’s appeal against an earlier judgment that he face 783 criminal charges has renewed uncertainty about his future.

The earlier High Court ruling had found that the 2009 decision by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to withdraw the charges of corruption, money laundering and racketeering against Zuma was irrational.

The judgment forms part of three milestones in Zuma’s recent history dominated by corruption, unethical conduct and his ability to avoid criminal charges. These were, firstly, the Schabir Shaik case in which Zuma’s financial advisor was convicted of corruption as a result of his relationship with him. The second was the Nkandla case that involved the use of public funds on lavish renovations to Zuma’s private homestead. The Constitutional Court found that Zuma had acted illegally and in a way that was inconsistent with the Constitution.

The third is the latest case, known as the “spy tapes” case. This involved intercepted discussions in 2007 between the then National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka and Leonard McCarthy (head of the then elite crime-fighting unit, the Scorpions) about the timing of Zuma’s indictment. Mokotedi Mpshe, who succeeded Ngcuka in an acting capacity, withdrew the charges in 2009, arguing that these discussions showed the charges were politicised.

The “spy tapes” saga returned with the application by the opposition Democratic Alliance to be given a copy of the tapes Mpshe used to exonerate Zuma. It was followed by another application for a judicial review of Mpshe’s decision. The High Court subsequently declared Mpshe’s decision irrational. This view has now been affirmed by the Supreme Court of Appeal.

Complications

A number of factors are going to complicate Zuma’s options after this judgment. The first is that, unlike most other states, the South African legal system does not include presidential immunity or amnesty.

The second factor is about timing. Zuma’s term as president of the governing African National Congress ends in December when the party is due to elect a new leader. He will at that point lose most of his political power and will therefore be less able to protect himself by co-opting key figures in the criminal justice system.

It’s against this background that his preference for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to succeed him is part of his strategy to avoid being convicted during his retirement.

Implications of the judgment

The implications of the Appeal Court judgment for a Zuma counter-strategy are important. The first one is that the relevance of the spy tapes has been removed. The fact that the Court concluded that the motive for charging a suspect is irrelevant and that procedural questions can only be settled by the trial court, removed the contextual arguments of political misappropriation of judicial processes and also important discretionary options from the NPA.

The second one is that the judgment made it impossible for the National Director of Public Prosecutions to review his own decisions and that only a trial court could do it. Again, it limits the NPA’s discretion.

The third one is that the Supreme Court of Appeal raised serious concerns about the NPA’s integrity in 2009, the quality of its legal interpretations and the serious internal differences of opinion. This will become a major test of the NPA’s credibility.

The fourth implication is that the rationality principle has been reinforced. The final decision taken by the National Direct of Public Prosecutions Shaun Abrahams will be subjected to the same test.

The Supreme Court of Appeal did not spell out in any detail what steps the NPA should take next. Two interpretations have emerged: the one is to take the process back to 2009 and that the charges must be reinstated by the NPA. The second one is that the matter should be considered anew by the NPA. This would have to include Zuma’s insistence that he makes presentations before he can be indicted.

The scene is therefore set for legal game-playing. What’s clear is that the decision about Zuma’s indictment will not be finalised and implemented any time soon.

Implications of a Zuma trial

What are the implications of a Zuma court case in the near future?

The first is that having him in court would have a negative effect on government activities until 2019. This can’t be used as an excuse not to prosecute him – in any case this would amount to another irrelevant political motive which the Appeal Court has, in principle, disqualified. A power void would nevertheless cascade down the tiers of government.

The second possible implication is that, if summonsed, Zuma would have no choice but to resign of his own accord. If this happened, an Acting President would have to be appointed and a new President elected within 30 days. This could either be the new ANC President, due to be chosen at the party’s conference in December, or a caretaker president (as happened previously) until 2019.

The third possibility is that Zuma would be forced to resign in the same way that the governing ANC forced Thabo Mbeki out of presidency in 2008. Given its inherent potential to create instability and lead to splits in the ANC makes this the worst case scenario.

All three possible outcomes are not only detrimental to Zuma, but also to the ANC in general. Revelations that are bound to come out in any court case will seriously embarrass the ANC and will provide ample ammunition for the opposition in an election campaign. This would be true whether Zuma was still president or not.

This leaves presidential hopeful Cyril Ramaphosa and the part of the ANC that is aligned to him with a conundrum. They have characterised themselves as being anti-corruption as well as striving for the moral renewal of the ANC. They would have to weigh this against the countervailing effects of having Zuma on trial.

The option of a political settlement can also not rescue the situation, because the case against President Zuma has become a moral litmus test for the ANC.

Dirk Kotze, Professor in Political Science, University of South Africa

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Life stories of significant South African women told through the prism of love

Nelson Mandela and his comrade, anti-apartheid activist, Fatima Meer.
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South Africa’s apartheid social engineering, the post-1994 victory over racialised inequality and the subsequent recognition that the victory may have been Pyrrhic have elicited a vast literary response, including a fascinating body of personal responses in the form of memoirs, biographies and autobiographies.

These narratives have sought to memorialise significant lives that drove the anti-apartheid struggle, and often focused on documenting the times that created the people.

An emerging trend is one that foregrounds the family in the lives of activists, rather than the established paradigm of the autonomous national auto/biographical hero. Examples that signal this shift are Gillian Slovo’s “Every Secret Thing” (1997) and Elinor Sisulu’s “Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime” (2002).

These auto/biographies take the social microcosm of the family, both nuclear and extended, as the most important matrix out of which lives committed to social justice emerge. They are then placed within the broader context of the nation.

Eros at the heart

“Love in the Time of Treason: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood” (2008) by Zubeida Jaffer and the autobiography, “Fatima Meer: Memories of Love and Struggle” (2017), acknowledge and recollect the households that created – and are created by – political activists – households which occupy a shifting space between private and public spheres. What sets these two life narratives in relief is the way in which they position eros at the heart of the narrative.

Cover of ‘The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood’.

Veteran journalist, Zubeida Jaffer, presents a portrait of an extraordinary person in decidedly ordinary, yet moving terms. Ayesha Dawood was a young woman in the little country town of Worcester near Cape Town in the 1950s when the first effects of apartheid were being felt. Despite a conservative, sheltered upbringing as the daughter of an Indian shopkeeper, Ayesha is drawn into various social protests and the trade union movement through her innate sense of justice.

Ayesha’s political involvement leads to her being arrested and tried at the Treason Trial of 1956 along with Nelson Mandela, and various other more high profile figures. She also subsequently is jailed and kept in solitary confinement for an extended period in a women’s prison in the nearby town of Paarl.

But contrary to expectation, the biography is not constructed around her activist experience. In fact, the biography does not even open with a focus on Ayesha. Instead, the story of her South African struggle experience begins with her future husband in India.

The narrative is constructed as a love story. It’s a love obstructed by numerous separations. Yusuf Mukadam falls in love with Ayesha at first sight in the village in India where she visits her grandmother. After her departure, despite no real contact with or commitment from her, Yusuf later joins the merchant navy as a cook. His sole purpose: to meet Ayesha again in Cape Town as part of a two-year voyage.

Yusuf sends a letter to inform her of his arrival. But the letter is never opened since Ayesha is in police custody at the time. Yusuf arrives in Cape Town and thinks he has been spurned when he is not met as arranged.

Some years later, back in India, he discovers why he didn’t get a response from the woman to whom he feels incontrovertibly and inexplicably bound. He then signs up for another voyage. This time he jumps ship in Durban and travels to Cape Town to meet and marry Ayesha, almost a decade after their first meeting.

Years into their marriage, after the birth of two children, Yusuf is arrested as an illegal immigrant. But the arrest is a pretext to blackmail Ayesha into acting as a police informant. Since she does not cooperate, her husband is deported to India, an exile which she shares with her life partner.

The poverty of the Indian village means that Yusuf must become a migrant worker in Kuwait in order to support Ayesha and the children. The family finally returns to South Africa, many years later, after the release of Mandela.

Throughout the biography, Jaffer foregrounds romantic attachments. The narrative is prologued by the occasion when Ayesha sees Mandela again on his visit to Worcester on the Blue Train in 1997. The bonds of intimacy between Mandela and Graça Machel at the train station, and Ayesha and Yusuf, are paralleled.

The biography is structured around and locates its narrative momentum in this enduring, ethically cognisant love – or as Jaffer has Ayesha succinctly utter:

Yusuf is my taqdeer (destiny).

Complex relationship

The love relationship is similarly foregrounded in internationally recognised academic-activist Fatima Meer’s autobiography, posthumously published by her daughter.

Cover of ‘Fatima Meer: Memories of Love and Struggle’.

What is surprising about Meer’s autobiography is the way in which the complex relationship with her husband, prominent struggle lawyer Ismail Meer, is used as the organising principle around which her life story is told.

If Yusuf was Ayesha’s destiny, Ismail seems to shape the destiny of Fatima. The Meer relationship is a curious one where a member of the extended family whom she had regarded as an uncle later comes to be her husband when they proverbially fall head-over-heels in love. As trusted “uncle”, Ismail plays a role in determining that Fatima, constrained by a conservative community, should get to study away from home at the University of the Witwatersrand, and influences what she should study.

In a somewhat less tranquil relationship than that of Ayesha and Yusuf, Fatima presents her husband, despite his fierce temper and tendency to domineer, as the central pole and pulse of her life. Fatima’s is a life that is internationally known for never being cowed, a life remembered for its outspoken, principled defiance and critique, even of comrades.

It’s not clear whether these two South African “romance” struggle auto/biographies are a harbinger of a trend, or whether they are anomalies that won’t be repeated. What they certainly do, is to focalise the anti-apartheid struggle through the lives of heroic women whose public and private lives were intimately bound and who were bound by love.

F. Fiona Moolla, Senior Lecturer in English, University of the Western Cape

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Under the Trump administration, US airstrikes are killing more civilians

Smoke from an airstrike rises in the background as a man flees during fighting between Iraqi special forces and IS militants in Mosul, Iraq, on May 17, 2017.
AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo

When President Donald Trump took office in January, it was unclear whether the bombast from his campaign would translate into an aggressive new strategy against terrorism. At campaign rallies he pledged to “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State. He openly mused about killing the families of terrorists, a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits violence against noncombatants.

Ten months into his presidency, a clearer picture is emerging. The data indicate several alarming trends.

According to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars, the first seven months of the Trump administration have already resulted in more civilian deaths than under the entirety of the Obama administration. Airwars reports that under Obama’s leadership, the fight against IS led to approximately 2,300 to 3,400 civilian deaths. Through the first seven months of the Trump administration, they estimate that coalition air strikes have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians.

Researchers also point to another stunning trend – the “frequent killing of entire families in likely coalition airstrikes.” In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths of at least 57 women and 52 children in Iraq and Syria.

The vast increase in civilian deaths is not limited to the anti-IS campaign. In Afghanistan, the U.N. reports a 67 percent increase in civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016.

The key question is: Why? Are these increases due to a change in leadership?

Delegating war to the military

Experts offer several explanations.

One holds that Trump’s “total authorization” for the military to run wars in Afghanistan and against IS has loosened Obama-era restrictions and increased military commanders’ risk tolerance. Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations notes: “Those closer to the fight are more likely to call in lethal force and are less likely to follow a value-based approach.”

In other words, an intense focus on destroying IS elements may be overriding the competing priority of protecting civilians. Because Trump has scaled back civilian oversight and delegated authority to colonels rather than one-star generals, the likely result is higher casualties.

Urban battlefield?

A second explanation points to the changing nature of the counter-IS campaign. The Pentagon contends that the rise in casualties is “attributable to the change in location” of battlefield operations towards more densely populated urban environments like Mosul and Raqqa.

This is a partial truth. While urban warfare has increased, Trump’s team has substantially escalated air strikes and bombings. According to CENTCOM data, the military has already used 20 percent more missiles and bombs in combined air operations in 2017 than in all of 2016. One notable airstrike in March, for example, killed 105 Iraqi civilians when U.S. forces dropped a 500-pound bomb in order to take out two snipers in Mosul. In fact, a Human Rights Watch analysis of bomb craters in West Mosul estimates that U.S. coalition forces are routinely using larger and less precise bombs – weighing between 500 and 1,000 pounds – than in prior operations. Finally, the urban battlefield explanation also does not account for increased civilian deaths in Afghanistan from airstrikes, where the environment has remained static for several years.

Pressure from the president

A third explanation of higher civilian casualties is that aggressive rhetoric from the president is inadvertently pressuring the military to take more risks and to deprioritize protecting civilians.

As former Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski observes: “If your leaders are emphasizing the high value of Raqqa and Mosul, while saying less about the strategic and moral risks of hurting civilians, it’s going to affect your judgment.” Words matter, especially coming from the commander-in-chief. In the face of such aggressive rhetoric, it should not come as a surprise that military officers feel encouraged – if not indirectly pressured – to take greater risks.

Unfortunately, the increased trend of civilian casualties is unlikely to diminish. In fact, signs abound that the White House is developing a new set of policies and procedures that will authorize more sweeping discretion to the military. In September, The New York Times reported that White House officials were proposing two major rules changes. First, they would expand the scope of “kill missions” and allow for the targeting of lower-level terrorists in addition to high value targets. Second – and more notably – they would suspend high-level vetting of potential drone attacks and raids.

These changes represent a sharp about-face. The Obama administration carefully crafted a deliberate set of rules guiding the use of force. In 2013, Obama released the Presidential Policy Guidance for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets (PPG), which created specific rules for determining when the use of force against terrorists was legally justified.

Then, in 2016, Obama issued an executive order on civilian harm that established heightened standards to minimize civilian casualties from military actions, and required the public release of information pertaining to strikes against terrorist targets.

While the latest actions from the Trump administration stop short of reversing Obama-era restraints, they are unsettling steps in the opposite direction. For example, it appears for now that the White House will preserve the “near certainty” standard, which requires commanders to have near certainty that a potential strike will not impact civilians. But this could change over time.

One senior official quoted in The New York Times article bluntly asserts that the latest changes are intended to make much of the “bureaucracy” created by the Obama administration rules “disappear.” As the White House dissolves the existing bureaucracy and relinquishes civilian oversight, Trump is embarking on a slippery slope that will potentially lead to major diminutions of civilian protection.

The current battle to take the Syrian city of Raqqa is emblematic of the stakes at hand. The U.S. is leading a punishing air war to soften IS defenses. In August, U.S. forces dropped 5,775 bombs and missiles onto the city. For context, this represented 10 times more munitions than the U.S. used for the whole of Afghanistan in the same month and year. The resulting civilian toll has been gruesome. At least 433 civilians likely died in Raqqa due to the August bombings, more than double the previous month’s total. Since the assault on Raqqa commenced on June 6, more than 1,000 civilians have been reported killed.

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein cautions that the intense bombardment has left civilians caught between IS’s monstrosities and the fierce battle to defeat it. Zeid insists that “civilians must not be sacrificed for the sake of rapid military victories.”

Trump would be wise to heed this warning. Even as U.S. forces continue to turn the tide on IS, the trail of destruction left in the campaign’s wake is unsettling. The specter of massive civilian casualties will remain a rallying point for new terrorist organizations long after anti-IS operations conclude.

Steven Feldstein, Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs & Associate Professor, School of Public Service, Boise State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

President Zuma loses bid to dodge 783 charges. But will he have the last laugh?

South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal has upheld a High Court Decision to reinstate almost 800 criminal charges against President Zuma.
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South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal has dismissed President Jacob Zuma’s and the National Prosecuting Authority’s appeal against an earlier decision by the North Gauteng High Court that a decision to dismiss 783 charges against Zuma in 2009 was irrational. Then, Zuma had claimed that the charges against him were part of a political conspiracy to prevent him from becoming president. But the North Gauteng High Court, in a case brought by the opposition Democratic Alliance, ruled last April that the charges of corruption, money laundering and racketeering against Zuma should be reinstated. The Conversation Africa’s Politics and Society Editor Thabo Leshilo spoke to constitutional expert law Pierre de Vos about the latest decision.

What are the implications of the judgment?

The judgment means that the original decision by the North Gauteng High Court to charge President Zuma stands and – in the absence of another legal move – the National Prosecuting Authority is legally obliged to implement it.

This means Zuma will be prosecuted unless Shaun Abrahams, the national director of public prosecutions, decides again to drop the charges (but on different legal grounds). The judgment also contains scathing criticism of the National Prosecuting Authority and its senior leadership.

It raises questions about the integrity of senior National Prosecuting Authority leaders and of the independence and impartiality of the prosecutions body. The judgment also notes that it was illegal for Zuma’s legal team to obtain and share the intercepted communications – the so called spy tapes – which raises questions about why no one (including Zuma’s lawyer, Roger Hulley) was ever charged for breach of the law.

What happens now?

Zuma’s lawyers will probably make another submission to Abrahams to argue that the charges must be dropped. This may include arguments that too much time has passed since the alleged crimes were committed or that new evidence has come to light that raises questions on whether the NPA has a winnable case against the President.

The Appeals Court left open whether Abrahams has the legal power to review a decision by the National Director of Public Prosecutions or not. If Abrahams does have this power, and if he again drops the charges, it will probably be the end of the matter.

If the charges are not dropped, the NPA will proceed with the prosecution, at which point Zuma’s lawyers will almost certainly approach the court to ask for a permanent stay of prosecution. It is not practically possible for Zuma to appeal to the Constitutional Court as his lawyers already conceded before the Supreme Court of Appeal that the decision to drop the charges was invalid.

What are Zuma’s options?

As the Supreme Court of Appeal points out in its judgment, Zuma and his lawyers have done everything in their power to prevent a situation where the president would have his day in court and would have to answer to the charges levelled against him.

This is why the president and his lawyers will continue to try to stop the prosecution by submitting new arguments to the National Prosecuting Authority on why the charges should be dropped. And, if that does not work, to try and convince the court that his prosecution must be stopped permanently because for some or other reason he could not receive a fair trial.

Can a sitting president be put on trial? Does South Africa have a precedent for it?

South Africa’s sitting president can be charged. There is no provision in the country’s constitution – or in ordinary legislation – that stands in the way of this happening.

The South African parliament could pass a law that changes this and protects a sitting president from criminal liability. But this wouldn’t get very far as such a law would be unconstitutional. It would be breach of the Rule of Law as developed by the South African Constitutional Court and it would also be in breach of section 9(1) of the Constitution which states that:

Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.

No sitting president has ever been charged with a criminal offence in South Africa. President Nelson Mandela was required to testify in a civil (as opposed to a criminal) case, after which the Constitutional Court imposed limits on when a sitting president would be required to testify in a civil case.

It would be unprecedented for a sitting president to face criminal charges and be prosecuted.

Pierre de Vos, Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa needs to revamp its new public transport system

KIM LUDBROOK/EAP

Over the past eight years the South African government has spent more than 130 billion rand on public transport projects in the country’s main cities. The projects included the refurbishment of rail services and the establishment of a new rapid rail and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems.

This is a lot of money by any standards. As a percentage of gross geographic product, South African cities devote about twice as much money to transport as other developing countries, and as much as four times more than some regions of the world.

The country should by now be celebrating the success of this investment. But sustaining the systems, especially the BRT systems, is proving to be difficult.

Even high ranking government officials have expressed doubts about the way things are going. The MEC for transport in Gauteng province, Ismail Vadi, recently asked whether government was getting value for money from the BRT systems. His concerns have been echoed by Joe Maswanganyi, the national minister of transport.

Maswanganyi suggested that it was time to rethink and redesign the systems to “stop draining money from the fiscus”. The BRT has been called a “mammoth flop” and “a white elephant” in some media.

Those are exaggerations. But there are serious problems with the BRT.

Fixing them must focus on reducing costs and growing income. Running costs should automatically decline as the system matures. But to raise revenue levels, BRT must become better integrated with housing and other transport services so that more people use them and help pay for them. In particular, the BRT should work with minibus-taxis to help widen the net of BRT usage. The country needs better planning and funding to make this happen.

Benefits and costs of BRT

BRT systems represent a significant improvement compared to traditional metro transport systems. They use dedicated lanes and stations, modern buses, and smartcard payment systems to speed up public transport and give passengers a better quality service.

This comes at a price. BRT ticket prices are typically higher than Metrorail but are set to be competitive with the minibus-taxi offering.

South Africa’s BRT systems are currently transporting more than 120,000 passengers (one-way trips) every day. Surveys show that passengers generally prefer the comfort and speed of BRT to other modes like minibus-taxis. So, based on passenger numbers alone, BRT is not a failure.

Passengers walk from the Johannesburg Bus Rapid Transit system in Johannesburg. The system is proving to be unsustainably expensive for the South African government.
KIM LUDBROOK/EAP

But the BRT systems in the country’s main cities, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Tshwane, are performing worse financially than was expected.

Between 2005 and 2016, a total of about R35.7 billion was allocated for the planning, design and construction of integrated public transport networks countrywide. Costs are pushed up by national government’s commitment to bring minibus-taxi operators into the system in such a way that they are no worse off than before.

This was partly driven by political pressure from taxi organisations, and partly to help bring an upgraded taxi industry into the formal transport network.

Despite these extra costs, South Africa’s spending on BRT systems is, per kilometre of busway, on par with many systems in Latin America and Asia. This suggests that the country has not overspent on infrastructure.

The problem is that fewer people than forecast are using the systems. Fare revenues are lower than expected.

Take Rea Vaya, the BRT in the main economic hub of Johannesburg, as an example. Demand grew by about 6% a year on average in the five years to 2016.

In 2016 Rea Vaya catered for about 50 000 passenger trips a day. This equates to about 1 100 daily boardings per kilometre of busway, but it’s far less than the average of 8 000 for comparable systems in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The productivity of each bus is low. Travel distances are long because of apartheid spatial planning and low densities. Seat turnover along the route is low and most passengers use the buses at peak times. The result is that Johannesburg and Cape Town have had to subsidise their BRT systems much more than planned.

Subsidy expectations came from using some Latin American cities, which operate with zero subsidy, as a benchmark. Planners expected fare revenues to cover direct operating costs. For Rea Vaya, the direct cost recovery ratio is only about 30% and for Cape Town’s MyCiTi just over 40%.

Subsidies in itself is not the problem. Subsidies for public transport are widely accepted as a way of making cities work better and protecting the environment.

The issue is that South Africa’s BRT subsidies are too high and haven’t produced the desired results. One senses from the minister’s comments that government’s appetite for subsidising what are seen as underperforming systems is waning. Unless the entire public transport system makes a better impact, the programme is likely to stall.

What can be done

Cities have relatively little room for growing revenues by raising fares. Recent research has shown that BRT demand in the Gauteng cities of Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane is very sensitive to fares. Higher fares would also exclude the poorest passengers, which would not help to make the transport system more equitable.

The solution is to improve passenger numbers by bringing BRT closer to where people live, work and play. South African cities have lower population densities than cities in Latin America. The demand for transport in South Africa is lower per square kilometre.

One way to bring people and BRT closer together is to develop housing along transport routes. This is already happening to a limited extent in Johannesburg’s Corridors of Freedom initiative. Mixed land use should also improve the productivity of buses and infrastructure.

Precincts served by BRT should also be made easier for pedestrians to use and more attractive to investors.

Bringing quality public transport within reach of more people requires more than just BRT. Recent studies show that existing and potential BRT users in Johannesburg value frequent, easily accessible transport and low fares more than short travel times. They want short walks to public transport. In other words, they want what minibus-taxis are already providing.

Bringing upgraded minibus-taxis into the formal network could greatly expand the number of people benefiting from investment in public transport.

South Africa should be putting more energy into integrating BRTs better with other public transport systems, including municipal buses, minibus-taxis and e-hail services like Uber. It should be working towards common cashless fare systems and easy transfers. Extending the special BRT corridors could follow at a slower pace.

Lastly, cities will have to find ways to raise additional revenues for public transport. These might include charging for the use and parking of cars in congested areas, or partnering with property developers to help build transport interchanges as commercial ventures. Pulling this off will require a wider conversation around whether South Africa wants the benefits of better public transport, and how it will pay for that.

The expansion and operation of bus rapid transit systems in South African municipalities can’t continue as it is. Government may withdraw its financial support unless cities can do three things: reduce costs, increase revenues and make the system work for more people.

Christo Venter, Associate Professor in Transport Engineering, University of Pretoria and Gary Hayes, PhD Candidate in Transportation Planning, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

This article was originally published on The Conversation.